I hadn’t thought about this until today after noticing several posts in my feed reader, you used to hear about the “Slashdot effect” when Slashdot (and I quote them “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”) linked to a smaller website and that smaller website received hundreds upon thousands of visitors and then caused the webserver to have issues, those issues may range fom the site running slowly due to the amount of traffic it’s receiving, running out of bandwidth, or even going over quota. Essentially it’s an overload.
The term the “Slashdot effect” was coined specifically for the example I give above when Slashdot made that link, although there are very few exact numbers it is believed ending up on the front page of Slashdot may results in somewhere between several hundered and several thousand hits every minute. As the story disappears off the frontpage the traffic starts to subside (this can taken anywhere up to 18 hours!!).
It’s recently been believed that the Slashdot effect isn’t what it used to be.
There are other sites that can have the same effect such Digg or Fark.com, but the one I’m interested in is StumbleUpon.
I introduced StumbleUpon to my other half and her family many months back and they were practically addicted, in fact I believe my wife was Stumbling (on StumbleUpon, not through alcohol) on our wedding day!!
But Stumble has it’s downsides as Tricia has found out, so far as to say she’s actually had to ask people not to stumble her posts, because of the effect it’s had in the past! She’s also concerned that Google might ban an Adsense account for inflated impressions when a site is “Stumbled” (let us know if you’ve experienced this!). In Tricia’s case she suspects an advertiser on her site did it to get more exposure – which I personally think is poor form from the advertiser and as she rightly points out if it takes her site down nobody will see the advert!
Vlad @ Affiliate Journey on the other hand had the experience of being Stumbled by Andy Beard, which led to him receiving 500 visitors in 10 minutes.
So may be it’s not just about the “Stumble effect”, it’s more about how popular the person is who actually stumbles you – people are clearly keen to find out what Andy does and doesn’t like on the web!
Keiron,
I think it definitely makes a huge difference who stumbles your post/website. In case of Andy, I am sure that majority or at least good number of his readers are “Stumblers” as well- hence the effect.
It will be interesting to see some good numbers of what this traffic worth in terms of subscribers. I am working on something that may give me an idea in that respect.
Hi Vlad,
Is that Shoemoney’s How to Make Money On A Site With A Small Budget?
I was interested in that myself, just finding the time I suspect!
Yes, that is exactly what I had in mind. I just posted on my blog a piece of code for the “jump page”.
So far so good, but it will probably take some time for the data to collect.
I don’t actually use StumbleUpon myself but I have seen huge spikes in traffic from there. But my guess is that what matters is getting stumbled by the right people or reach certain pages (home page?) – I don’t know really how StumbleUpon works. But with Slashdot it was about making the front page of Slashdot (and still is as well as Reddit and Digg). I know I get low level traffic from StumbleUpon followed by huge spikes. I have also had those spikes be very quick and but also have more of a tail (last longer than a few days – at fairly low levels but significantly above the normal low rates).