‘Fun’ With Statistics | Getting TechCrunched

Blimey .. it’s been something of a crazy 24 hours. I had a few spare moments yesterday and so decided to pull together some numbers from the Facebook advertising platform (which I’ve subsequently had to correct – that’s what happens when you spend about 5 minutes on an exercise!).

Knowing that they love all things Facebook I emailed Michael Arrington of TechCrunch with the data, and after a blur of emails the story made it to the TechCrunch homepage!

Here’s what that did to my blog stats (click the picture to see it full-size):

As you can see, just a small jump from my normal traffic!

I don’t include those stats here to brag, but rather to illustrate the amazing effect of word-of-internet when a story gets to one of the popular sites like TechCrunch, Digg, Reddit and so on. As it turned out, my data was somewhat erroneous (although there are still more females than males on Facebook according to the updated figures .. just perhaps not in such a large ratio), but that hasn’t stopped the story spreading through all the various sites that syndicate, borrow or steal TechCrunch content. There’s an amazing ‘halo’ effect of other sites – particularly blogs of course – mirroring popular stories in a hope that traffic will gravitate via topical searching and linkbacks.

This isn’t new, and the network effect of word-of-mouth or guerilla marketing has been around forever, but it is interesting to see it play out around your own site. You can see why so much effort is put into gaming stories onto Digg for example.

Anyway, I’m sure this will calm down as quickly as it came up. Shame I can’t carry Google adsense on WordPress – I could have made at least 50c out of this 😉

[update: speaking of viral marketing, there’s an interesting article on – surprise – Techcrunch today about marketing on YouTube]