Why gaming social sites is not worth the pain

Did it happen to you, in your childhood, to wish to be big for at least one day, to see how it felt like?

This is the story of a small site, wanting to take a look into the future and see how it is to be big for one day. This is the game and its results.

Day one: the site asks a bunch of friends to vote for him in a popular social site (it doesn’t matter which one). The friends did so, our little site was promoted to the first page and during 48 hours, it got almost 2200 page views. If we take out the 400 page views representing the normal traffic of two days, the 1800 additional page views came from this trick and we should count them for 24 hours, because this is how long a story stays on the first page.

Day two: disappointed by the result, our site tries harder to make a better plan.

Day three: a new post is out there, but now the friends were asked to vote for it at a particular time (which was immediately after posting). The friends helped the little site again and this time, another bunch of people voted for this story (which was neither great nor the dumbest of all). It goes on the first page and it gets 5200 page views in 48 hours. We take out the usual 400 and we get 4800 page views earned via this little trick.

Conclusions:

1. It feels good to be big, the site is now determined to get there honestly
2. Gaming social sites does not bring in so much benefit to be worth trying. As you can see from the graph, the traffic dropped immediately to its usual value. So, if you are a small site, this does not help you to grow at all. If you are big, why should you care about some additional 5000 page views earned in one day, when you have at least this kind of traffic each day? Be sure that you cannot repeat the trick more than twice before you get banned. So was our little hero, but at least he is happy with the conclusions and determined to take it easy and grow naturally. No more steroids, that’s for sure!