And The Contagious Winner Is...

from the don't-touch-that-envelope dept

Over the last month or so there have been a whole bunch of bizarre websites being sent around -- some funny, some just weird -- and in almost every case you could assume they were part of the Contagious Media contest to launch a site and make it popular without advertising as quickly as possible. Now that the contest is over, Mark Glaser is taking a deeper look at the contest and some of the contestants to see what they learned. Really, it seems like these are all just modern day attempts at recreating the Mahir "I Kiss You" phenomenon that took the web by storm in 1999. The interesting findings, though, included the fact that basic blog links weren't necessarily enough to get most of these to the top of the contests charts. A few core "meta-sites" (though, some consider them blogs anyway) were the real traffic drivers for many sites. Also, random mentions elsewhere -- such as on the radio or in the press helped. One thing that seemed amusing during this contest (though, not discussed in Glaser's article) was the constant response any time a big name blog linked to one of these sites where people would quickly jump up screaming that the sites were hoaxes because they were a part of the contest. While, in some cases, the sites were "hoaxes," most of the time it was perfectly obvious they were in this contest from the beginning, so it hardly seemed like they were trying to fool anyone.

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