riding the Google Images wave! ???
How about this… last weekend I started to see loads of visitors coming here…
click to see some stats
through links like this one:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://geektechnique.org…
But all the ‘googles’ were different, you know, images.google.[country] and also the queries were all different… like ‘cracked screen’, ‘cracked lcd screen’ and ‘cracked lcd wallpaper’ etcetera…
click to see the ‘cracked screen’ query on Google Images yourself
They all came for this old blogpost of mine, where I posted some wallpapers of a cracked LCD screen in different resolutions. (I, on my turn got them from fontblog.de, I credited them back then and I’m crediting them now. I only linked to them (and mirrored the wallpapers), that’s all!)
It was quite obvious the visitors weren’t clicking some link, otherwise everyone would’ve come here exactly the same way. So, what was going on here? Did someone say something in a podcast or such? And what kind of podcast is that? I mean, if I already see visitors in the thousands… that must’ve been one extremely popular podcast…
In the end (thank you, a lahr) it seemed that in a certain video it was mentioned that you could get this wallpaper by typing ‘cracked screen’ into Google Images.
click to go to the video on break.com
And boy, did the viewers do that! The video does extremely well I guess, it shows 400,000 viewers in, what, 2 days? In the meantime I’ve been getting 30,000 visitors on the Cracked LCD blogpost alone…
That’s quite a conversion rate! But then again, conversion rates are for marketeers and I don’t do ads, so what do I care? ^_^
Anyway, prank away!
permalink - 
add to del.icio.us
next: project: encrypted NAS on OpenBSD
Well, the whole cracked LCD deal was on Digg. It’s the indirect aftermath of the Digg effect.
Well, I’m not surprised by the Digg effect or by the amount of viewers for that video (although it's an awful lot!), I’m surprised that this many people actually started looking through Google Images because some video told them they should do so (and thereby causing quite a wave on its own)… ;-)
Weird things happens. My cracked-lcd-story is nearly 2 years old … funny.
>My cracked-lcd-story is nearly 2 years old
If you still happen to have the screen, you should put it up on eBay! The world’s most famous cracked LCD screen! With a little bit of luck you should gather enough for a new screen… :-)
I googled “cracked lcd wallpaper” when I saw a video of a prank on Break.com.
Yours looked good so I clicked :)
a guy that hates marketeers and doesn’t do adds is my kind of a guy.
Therefore Respect.
klap klap enzo.
I found the cracked screen jpg for sale on ebay.com.au for $1!