unfortunate placement of yahoo ad
Or, how a funny little picture became famous.
A couple weeks ago, David, Jennifer and I went to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. While we were there, David’s dad was able to get us tickets to the Giants, Cardinals game at the beautiful AT&T Park. While we where there, we had the camera out almost the entire time. David and I even got to try our hand at some sports photography from way up on the third base line with the telephoto lens. Jennifer pointed out that the Yahoo! ad was right next to the 404 foot sign. (For those less technically inclined, 404 is the error code for “Page Not Found.”) I snapped a picture, and Jennifer posted it to her flickr account.
David was showing our trip pictures to his Dad, who thought the Yahoo! picture was funny and mentioned it to John Murrell, who then wrote about it in “Good Morning Silicon Valley” on Thursday. When heard about this Friday morning, the picture had around 6,000 views. How cool is that! Wouldn’t it be neat if we posted it to Digg and it got on the front page? Well, as all things that have the slightest chance of being popular on the Internet are, someone (digismyworld, go figure) had already submit it to Digg. So I was the 7th person to digg it and headed off to a meeting. When I got back, it had just hit the front page and the Flickr page showed 17,000 views.
By the end of the day, the picture had over 100,000 views, the digg post was #1 on the top 10 list with over 4,000 diggs (beating the second place post by almost 2000 diggs), and dozens of people had blogged the picture.
Wow.
I don’t know most of the people who have seen the picture, but there are a couple I do:
Yahoo! blogged it.
Eric Meyer added the picture as a favorite. He’s written a couple books on CSS and I read his blog.
John Battelle blogged it. He did a very nice job at the Web 2.0 Expo interviewing Eric Schmidt (of Google), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) and Jeff Weiner (of Yahoo!).
Where is it now? Well, the number are still going up, but right now there are 5088 diggs, 150 blog posts about it, and 195,031 views of the picture.
Now I just need to find 5,000 of my closest friends to go look at the picture and we’ll break the 200,000 mark…
April 29th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
[…] Jennifer, Jeremy and David of the One:Ten household recently were in San Fran for the Web 2.0 Conference. While there, they noticed a humorous photo and Jennifer posted it to her Flickr page. Long story short, it got big on Digg (and now Reddit). Looking through the rest of the pictures in the album, I noticed an interesting effect. While the main photo had a huge number of hits, the photos in the album photostream to the left and right of it seemed to regularly decrease. Scientific instincts took over and I graphed it. The red bar indicates the Dugg photo, and is not to scale with the rest of the data. As seen above, there is a rapid decline in the number of views, but clearly some following links to the photo decided to stick around and look through more of the album. Interesting, but not surprising, to note that most decided to view photos to the right of the main picture. […]
April 30th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
[…] Here’s a link for those of you non-geeks wondering just what the heck is so funny. Back story is here. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
May 5th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Irony!? Go figure. I noticed right away that there seemed to be something afoot about this photo…after reading what was really going on, I had a nice little chuckle, a fleeting thought of something learned many years ago in my college marketing class, and finally, decided to share the following thought–”advertising may be annoying as hell to most of us, but one must admit that there are some that just makes you laugh because it really makes sense!”
Maestro.