Advice: Don’t state the URL to your web site in an iPhone commercial on national television
Written on October 23, 2007 by Jason Terhorst and 7 people have commented
I was just watching “House, MD” a moment ago on television, and during the middle of one of the commercial breaks, one of Apple’s iPhone ads, “the Winger”, aired. In the bit, the girl recites her blog’s URL, thewinger.com. I can only assume that led to an uncountable amount of traffic slamming into her site after that. I kind of have a thing for cute ballerinas (or cute girls who describe their blog on national TV), so I wanted to check out the site. All I saw were server timeouts and slow loading. Whoops.
Moral of the story? Don’t announce your web site in an Apple commercial unless your server is ready for the traffic. Especially when you have a pretty face. Ask Justine Ezarik about that one.
#1 David C says:That’s pretty funny. I saw the same commercial during House, and even though I’d seen it before, I pulled my iPhone out and tried to load the site. Yea, didn’t happen. I think the play director guy says his site too, but I can imagine his might be still up.
#2 Sara says:That’s one of the reasons I still keep my blog on the hosted Wordpress platform. When popularity hits, they should be ready.
#3 Hunter says:It seems to be up as of right now. Actually, loaded pretty quickly. I guess she got back up servers up.
#4 Aaron says:Adding the personal info was a ploy by Apple to make the people more “authentic” Like Kristin and Ken. I think the first four people are script readers. iPhone Savior did a good post on the two real people back stories and Cnet also did a story on Bryce the pilot.No one is buying it!
#5 Yeroc says:Unless of course you actually wanted more traffic to your blog… which is something that that person just may have wanted.
#6 Erik says:I think Yeroc nailed it on the head.
Regular ol’ blogger gets massive amounts of traffic. The cost/benefit analysis looks like this:
Cost - some of the zillions of people trying to get to my blog won’t be able to access it (though they weren’t accessing it before the ad came out).
Benefit - zillions of people will try to get to my blog, and many of them will be able to access it. Whatever message I’m trying to put out into the world will now reach many more people than it otherwise would have.
Advantage = state the URL in the commercial
#7 Ryan Hollis says:I would do ANYTHING to get my website on an iPhone commercial! That would be epic.
hey guess what I’m putting my website on a widely read blog so I’m sure its gonna get flooded
http://ryanhollis.webs.com
every body go hit it