:: Apple-orange hybrid still not ready ::

Monday, June 27, 2005

Joey Anuff, one of the founders of Suck.com, forbearer of many a blog in both format and snarky tone, explains a realization they had in 1996, as part of a very detailed history of the site:

"We learned very quickly that print mentions of the site did absolutely nothing," says Anuff. "Nothing at all. Print, I don’t care if it was the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek-print mentions of the site did shit for us."

That sounds eerily similar to something Daniel Engber, one of the creators of Eating While Crying - part of the Contagious Media Showdown - just wrote in Slate last Thursday:

I pored over our traffic records to figure out what went wrong. Our television and radio spots hadn't really helped. All of that mainstream press came as we slid down from the contagious peak of our first few days. Newspaper articles didn't translate into lots of hits; all they did was lead to more print and television coverage. (The link I added to my Slate bio didn't help too much, either—it accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of CwE's visitors.) Most of our traffic came from blog links and Web sites like College Humor and Something Awful.

Almost a decade has passed, and exogenous promotion still fails to affect the web.

Posted by morland @ 04:44 PM

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