Update, June 2020: I’ve sold BeardGuru.com, so I am no longer responsible for its content.
During last Wednesday’s episode of The Middle, the teenage son defended his fledgling beard to his parents:
“For your FYI, this is only two days old, and according to beardguru.com, I’m showing above-average hair growth for my age.”
When I hear a website mentioned on TV, I always check it out the next time I’m at a computer, just to see how much care the writers and producers took in extending their storyline to the Web. Usually, the domain just redirects to the network’s website. Sometimes, like in the case of The Office‘s WUPHF.com, the URL is a full-fledged experience that has obviously been given a lot of care.
In the case of beardguru.com and The Middle, there was nothing there. I loaded it twice to make sure, and then I ran a WHOIS – the domain wasn’t registered at all. I’ve never seen that happen before, so I immediately registered it myself, interested to see what kind of traffic would be driven to a website by a single mention in the middle of a fairly popular network TV show. (Given that I was watching the episode on my Tivo half an hour after its airtime made the fact that the domain was unregistered especially surprising.)
After registering it, I stuck up a simple homepage with three components:
- Random quotes of wisdom from the “Beard Guru” that I came up with over the course of the first hour of the site being up
- A form to let users sign up for the Beard Guru’s mailing list (powered by MailChimp, which took only minutes to set up)
- A Facebook “Like” form for the Beard Guru Facebook page that I made shortly thereafter (and a link to @beardguru on Twitter).
Within minutes, I started to see visitors trickling in – about 200 people that night, with an obvious spike when the episode aired on the west coast. Thursday brought another 250 visitors, and another 100 people hit the site on Friday. (It will be interesting to see whether there continue to be mini-traffic spikes when that episode of The Middle is in reruns.)
Traffic Statistics
- Browser usage was led by Firefox, Safari, and Chrome; Internet Explorer usage was only at 18%.
- 15% of the visits came from mobile devices – iPhones, BlackBerries, iPods, and Android systems – a number that I expected to be higher for people casually browsing the Web while watching TV.
- The United States accounted for 83% of visits, with the remainder split between Canada, the UK, and Australia.
- California sent 25% of all visitors, which makes me think that if the domain had been live when the show aired on the east coast, it would have seen significantly more traffic.
Engagement
- Forty people signed up for the mailing list.
- Twenty-five people “Liked” Beard Guru on Facebook.
- Three people emailed me personally to ask how I had gotten the domain.
- Nobody followed @beardguru on Twitter.
- Each visit averaged about five pageviews due to the random beard quote that changes each time you refresh the page.
My expectations for total traffic were much higher; I had visions of tens of thousands of people loading the site, making it an instant traffic juggernaut, bringing the server to its knees, all while offers to buy the site would be rolling in from Google, Yahoo, and the American Beard Aficionado Coalition. Even though that didn’t happen, I’m pleased with the experience; beards and beard-related humor happen to be hobbies of mine, so I’ll continue to maintain beardguru.com. My plans are to have the site focus around an occasional humorous newsletter that will answer beard-related questions, whether user-submitted or made up by myself, with previous editions archived on the website.
(If you’re interested in receiving the Beard Guru newsletter, the signup form is front and center on BeardGuru.com.)
Great experiment! Seems like the show’s producers ought to have had a site up there. Even though the traffic was not huge, this was a great way to connect with the show’s “top” fans.
Great job/very interesting.
The hacker news link will send 1,500 people, Reddit will send 2,500 and if you get a top link on digg perhaps another 2,500. All will drive many more visitors than TV.
The secret to TV is getting someone to endorse the product in a real way. Oprah or Ellen discussing why they love a website would drive tens of thousands, and memberships would be significant.
Also, people forget about radio, but that works much better than TV since many folks are on their computers while listening to the radio.
Howard Stern is probably the gold standard.
Also, Leo Laporte will drive low thousands of visits in my experience.
Converrrrge. :) Great idea/experiment. Would love to hear how it pans out now.
Fantastic. I always wondered what would happen. The browser split is interesting, demonstrating a certain geek trait that I guess could have been anticipated.
If only this had been created prior to the original air time! Love the browser stats… thanks for sharing.
Interesting stuff. I think you probably get more traffic if a show mentions an “obviously Googleable” topic and your site happens to be at #1. I have this experience with a client — they offer holidays to a specific destination, and when that destination gets featured in a travel show or something it drives thousands of visits, even though their site is never mentioned by name.
Was always wondering this as well. I think it also would depend on the show as well as how much the website relates to those who watch the show. Either way its always good to have your website mentioned on network television.
holy crap. I can’t believe they didn’t register it.
actually, after looking at your stats, maybe i get it. I always thought the traffic would be huge. I wonder what a cnbc or msnbc mention gets your. or a blurb in print.
the mobile stats make sense.
“I had visions of tens of thousands of people loading the site” …. funny – the TV show’s producers were thinking the same thing about the show. Hmmm….
Years ago on Gilmore Girls, Paris said to Rory, “google Rory sex boat.” I wrote a post with that title that night and I can tell when that episode is shown in syndication around the world. Between 18 and 20 minutes past the hour, I’ll get hits on my blog from the same country. Sometimes just 5 hits, sometimes 100.
It’s really interesting to see how much traffic is (or isn’t) driven from TV.
That’s terrific! Nice work and thanks for sharing the results – let us know how it progresses.
Any conclusions about the lack of twitter follows? I wonder if adding the twitter logo “t” would make a difference.
Thought you might appreciate this as well.
http://www.slatev.com/video/how-i-ran-ad-fox-news/
After reading your post I saw your bio and thought you might find a project I’m working on of interest. We’re building a privacy/security Firefox plug-in that lets you run through a proxy and encrypts everything (protects not only your privacy but from being hacked by Firesheep).
We’re in beta and it’s free if you’d like to check it out. http://www.getCocoon.com We’d love any feedback or suggestions.
Thanks again for sharing your experiment with us!
DavidKris
Its really surprising that they didn’t register it. Did you happen to see pronouncify.com on 30 rock?
Thank you for sharing
mobile statistics agree
I just don’t know anyone else like you. :)
Thats funny that you were able to find a domain that was free — One time I was watching a tv show (it was some miniseries, I forget what it was called but a bunch of people were kidnapped and trapped in a town).. anyway there was a very quick scene where there was an email on the screen. So I went back and froze the screen on that email, and looked and the web address was like somethingandsomethinglawyers.com and I who-is’ed it and they had even registered that. The page came up blank when you entered the URL but the URL itself was owned by NBC (or whoever it was).
I am like you though, I always check the domains — just to see what was on it.
I don’t know anyone else like you either :( The world could use at least 50 more.