At lunchtime today my brother sent me an email saying that he’d managed to get a comment including a link to 50WordReview onto one of the BBC news stories about the 100 coolest websites. In fact it’s not even a real link, just the website address has been added as text so anyone reading it would need to copy and paste or manually type the url into their browser. Even so, within two hours of it being posted the traffic to the site has exceeded a normal day by tenfold, I’ve earned around 2 weeks worth of Adsense revenue (not much I can promise you!) and a load of new reviews have been posted.
To say I am stunned is a bit of an understatement, and I definitely understand a little more why the comment spammers (evil bastards though they are) do what they do. Maybe not on the small traffic sites like your average Domino blog but on the larger sites like Ed or Volker I guess the tiny percentage of click through traffic makes all of the effort worthwhile.
Update: OK so by the end of the day yesterday the site traffic was 80 times what would normally be expected, the RSS subcriptions went up by 1000% and we have had 30 new reviews. Absolutely incredible. Just have to hope that all of this stays within my bandwidth limit for the month!
