The UnSub

My earlier article on my web traffic experiment discussed about the usual approach of using social bookmarks such as Digg and StumbleUpon to get the initial wave of traffic.

Today, I logged back into my Blogrush account just to poke around. It seems they met teething problems. The founder, John Resse wrote a “memo” to the members explaining several issues.

I can understand the difficulty and challenges met by providing such a service. Apart from the network traffic, load balancers, app servers and such, I believe the most tedious work is to compute syndication credits for users and distributing the user’s link in an effective and efficient manner.

Just to give an idea what kind numbers we are talking about… (The ratios are given by John)

The two tables above represent two simplistic scenarios. For the sake of simplicity, we assume each site has 100 impressions. For the first case, we imagine each user will only refer one other user. Think of it as a family tree, 1st generation would mean the user you referred directly, the 2nd generation would be your user’s referred user, so on and so forth.

Of course, in real life, things may not be the case that one user only refer one other user. This particular case would bring the first guy (ie. you), 450 syndication credits. Erm… not really impressive considering the fact that there are 5 RSS entries in a widget, that would mean a 1/5 or 20% chance of being click if someone bothers to look at the widget.

How about each user referring two other users? This would basically form what is known as a binary tree. The possible syndication credits now hits 27700 credits for this hypothetical example. Note that all parameters such as ratios, site impressions and generations are fixed, only number of referrals changed. That is the so call exponential effect!

Again this is just a hypothetical example, in real world, the tree would be complicated thus making computation really interesting and challenging. Note that I am not here to discuss how effective this scheme is nor am I in the position to question the quality of these referral traffic.

Each syndication credit merely allows your RSS entry to be shown in someone else’s blog widget. Some reader of another blog would still need to click, but at least it is unlike social bookmark sites where it is likely that users click together in a short span of time, bringing servers to a halt.

If the reader were to search, one can find a myriad of comments that are both negative as well as positive. However, I would see it as less effort in the long round if one were to start some referrals now to enjoy the viral and exponential effect. Afterall, it is a game of numbers…

For now, there are a couple of referral hits from the widgets but still low since I probably have no referrals. If you are a blogger and find my article useful, why not sign up with my referral link and give it a try?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 12:47 am and is filed under Internet, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.