Shortiks a month later, or how does the Habraeffect actually look like

The intro

Exactly one month has passed since the day we presented the project “Shorts” on Habré - short and funny . For the month of its existence, the site has evolved from a random crafts into a major entertainment resource with high attendance, requiring daily updates. However, in the last post I did not mention something ...

The site "Shortiki" appeared a couple of days before the post on Habr . The site did not unwind in any way, for it did not buy advertising, I almost did not tell anyone about it. The only mention of the site on the network was on Habré. The purpose of the experiment was to find out what effect the notorious Habraeffect has on the site. And not only direct influence (transitions from the post), but long-term, indirect influence - the word of mouth effect, links, mentions in the media and so on. Looking ahead, I will say that the experiment was a success - under the cat curious statistics awaits, graphics and much other interesting information about the phenomenon called Habraeffektom.
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The shortiki

Primary habraeffekt: (statistics of transitions from Habra, for a month of existence of the website):



Secondary habraeffekt: (statistics of transitions NOT from Habr, for a month of the site existence):



"Shorts" in numbers - for the first month (from August 8 to September 8) were registered:

214,722 visitors
611,378 page views
6 minutes average site visit
3 pages viewed by each visitor
1,111 followers in google reader
11,974 shorts sent by visitors
179 shorts are made up from sent
658 shorts added manually by moderator
110 shorts (on average) added weekly
837 shorties in total on the site (now it is approaching 1,000)

Mail.Ru

Literally a week after the site was opened, Mail.Ru turned to us with a proposal for mutually beneficial cooperation. Negotiations lasted about two weeks. As a result, Mail.Ru and its representative Alex_Popov, we conducted interesting research on the traffic in social networks and achieve better performance of word of mouth. However, this is a topic for a separate article, which will soon appear on the Mail.Ru blog .

The echo

Almost immediately after the appearance of the topic on the website, the site began to appear regularly in various reviews, podcasts and media. The first serious media to tell about us was Ferrat . The first major site to put the link was Best-Links . Then the links started to appear much faster - most in blogs and closed communities, one user even called "Shorties" a killer of the borgorg. Laughed.

Finally, on September 6, about Shorts EXTREMELY was told on the air of Ekho Moskvy:

You can listen to the recording of the broadcast here , and read the text - here .

The copy

A few days later, popular acclaim came to the “Shortcuts” - the site was copied. Moreover, they did not steal the idea or the content, but all at once, simply making Save As ... in the browser and adding a couple of scripts.



The copier did not change anything except copyrights and (what resourcefulness) the size of the shorts (on the original site they are 255 characters):



It is clear that Shortiqs are not a high-tech innovation in the world of the web, and millions of profits and brilliant ideas have not been stolen. But this does not become less offensive. Having calculated the identity of a talented copy-pasteor, they sent him a letter drawn up by a lawyer explaining why stealing is not good and how the criminal code relates to this. Fortunately, the guy turned out to be reasonable and closed the site, the case did not come to court.

The deal

A week after the publication of the topic, buyers, investors and potential partners began to appear. Buyers, in general, offered to purchase the entire site "here and now" for 50-60 thousand rubles. There were also a few serious buyers, while negotiations are underway, though, rather sluggishly. The main difficulty is that negotiations are slow, and the price of the site is growing, literally, by day, along with recognizability (the word “shorts” is slowly becoming a meme) and attendance.

Partners - in addition to cooperation with Mail.ru there were also various offers. Two radio stations wanted to make a broadcast with "Shortikami", but the negotiations somehow reached an impasse, so if someone wants to do this - go for it.

Where is the money, Zin? ..

Surely, many will be interested in the question of profitability. Here, I will probably be forced to disappoint - the task of obtaining the maximum profit (at the time of the experiment) did not stand, therefore only ordinary contextual advertising was set.

Initially, advertisements were made as simple as possible - they installed two Google AdSense banners. A few days everything went well, but suddenly on most pages the ads stopped showing. After several hours of active googling and attempts to find technical support contacts, it became clear to have no one to talk to, and Google has such problems when their robot cannot find an advertisement for a particular page, or for some reason found this page to be inappropriate There is only one way out - do not put ads on these pages, or change advertiser. Chose the last option.

Yandex.Direct quickly came to replace AdSense. At Yandex, I was very surprised by the need to register and spend all the data and money through CSCs (Partner Service Center), which are completely unknown offices that have no relation to Yandex, but for some reason you can withdraw money only through them. Why I cannot receive money from Yandex myself without employing third parties, I did not understand. Another point that confused in Yandex is a strange CPC, which ranged from almost zero values ​​to several rubles. The nature of such fluctuations remained unsolved.

In any case, Yandex showed approximately the same performance, and its advertising was also sometimes not visible to users. Now we use the following solution - in Yandex.Direct (and in AdSense) there is an option of “backup advertising” - if Yandex could not show the user an advertisement, then it tries to show Google ads. In this scheme, in almost all cases, advertising is shown as necessary.

In the middle of the month I came across the site Nolix.ru, and decided to try their system - I really liked the concept. I can say that Nolix gives a much greater return than contextual advertising. However, recently they have become more technical problems - advertising is sometimes not shown, the site has nginx errors. Contact the support is impossible, because while the site is lying - the mandatory captcha doesn't work for them :).

Well, the most interesting thing is the statistics on money, also for the month:

$ 203 earned with Google Adsense.
$ 510 earned from Yandex.Direct (about 15,300 r.)
$ 370 earned from Nolix.ru.

$ 1.083 earned total.

Do you know that...

* A considerable percentage of harabrachiteli, going to the site begin to look for vulnerabilities on it. And actively and quite well.
* At peak, the habraeffect reached 100 queries / sec, the server load was insignificant (Load averages 0.15).
* Habraeffect is VERY long - a month after the first post , 600-700 people a day still arrive.
* Secondary effect (appearing links to the site, word of mouth) is much stronger than the primary Habraeffect (transitions directly from Habra).

Interesting Facts

• The first two weeks the shorts were added and were directly installed via phpMyAdmin, until Fratyr took pity and wrote me such a kind of admin panel (for which many thanks to him!):
  
  
  
• At the very beginning a big mistake was made - many, in order to protect themselves from spam, distort email addresses, for example, “vasya [@] pupkin. ru. " I decided to go a little further, and replaced the contact email with "vasya (canis lupus familiaris) pupkin.ru". Only two weeks later it turned out that many people wanted to write something to us, could not understand what the correct email address was. The first investor wrote to us through the form of adding shorts “Yes, fix the email already, in fact!”

The future

What now? And now, in fact, the site will begin its development. In the near future it is expected to do the following:

* Normal pagination
* Site search
* News on the site
* To fasten the new button from Mail.ru
* Shortiki API
* Come up with a new "Top"
* IPhone app

Thanks for attention!

UPD: After the publication of the topic, a powerful DDoS started on the site. I am trying with all my strength to repel the attack, but this is difficult, because the attack is powerful, and I don’t have the resources at all (the shorts live on the usual mini-Dedik of Hezner). I hope you will treat with understanding - the site can slow down or reset the connection with the browser.

At 21:58 - The attack began half an hour ago and continues.

UPD 2: At the peak, there were almost 900 requests / sec. The attack continues, but managed to dodge so that it almost did not reach the web server. The site should open normally.