Eff Seven

I’m still feeling the effects of being linked to by a bigger site. It’s a phenomenon that most of the internet is familiar with, either from a spectator’s point of view or from having it happen to them. There are tutorials, even, on what to do if you’re linked to from bandwidth-annihilating sites such as Digg.com or BoingBoing, because if you’re hit on that sort of a scale then servers tend to crash, confusion attacks, and then no-one knows what was cool enough to click on in the first place.

Anyway, here’s something I’ve wanted to investigate for a while, but haven’t had any data on whatsoever - how does internet fame work? I’m pretty sure the entire thing could be modelled statistically if you had enough data, and here’s an indication of how it might go:

According to his mochibot stats, Kian Bashiri (the friendly chap behind You Have To Burn The Rope) received 100,000 pageviews on April 6th (102,589, pedantry fans!). Mochibot damages its reputation slightly by claiming only 44 of these were unique, but let’s roll with it and pretend that’s accurate. Of the one hundred thousand, 2,772 clicked through the link to the text edition here at Eff Seven - about 2.7%.

That’s not bad bearing in mind that the link here was ‘under the cut’ - i.e. you had to scroll down to see it - but it might surprise you that it’s so low, given that most of those reaching You Have To Burn The Rope had only been through one click to get there. Does it really decay that fast?

Well, no. Of the people that reached Eff Seven, 412 clicked through to download the text edition that they’d come here for in the first place - about 14% this time.

Now you look ahead two days, though, and any hope of analysis goes flying out of the window tied to a jetpack. Of the 105,000 hits the parent site received, Eff Seven got just 1% of - 1,000 or so. And of them, only 10% clicked through to download the text game. I guess you could explain this by saying that at this stage, most people coming to the site were looking for updates. But what’s more likely is that two days is such a fantastically long time on the Internet, that the entire makeup of the traffic would have changed - where it came from, what kind of user it was.

I don’t know if it’s a bit weird, or nerdy to say, but I think studying this would be pretty interesting. A lot of people try to get a slice of the big Hive minds that surf around slashdot and Digg. I’m sure there’s a way of working out where the hurricane’s going to hit next.