I’ve been looking at the traffic stats from this week’s Digg spike in our logs. Here are some observations about the 21,000 visits we’ve received so far:

BROWSERS

• 64.42% use Firefox
• 20.02% use IE
• 9.82% Safari
• 3.11% Opera

PLATFORMS

• 75.92% Windows
• 18.69% Mac
• 5.06% Linux

SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

• 30.83% 1280 x 1024
• 27.15% 1024 x 800
• Less than 1.5% use 800X600 or lower

About 40 to 45 % have Flash 9+ installed. Digg drove a little more than half of all traffic within the last 3 days with the following break down: Day 1 – 72% of traffic, Day 2 – 31% of traffic, Day 3 – 21% of traffic. So basically Digg is like a giant filter that feeds out to the rest of the web/blogosphere, since now we have a ton of referrers.

These stats are definitely from the web crowd and are SOOO different than the stats I see on “normal” non-tech-focused websites (you know, the ones outside our echo-chamber – the ones visited by the people who make up the rest of the 95% of the population.)

For instance, Firefox penetration usually runs around 15% for other sites I’ve monitored – generally between 6% and 25%. Also, 5% of Linux users is quite high compared to 0.10% to 0.5% that I usually see.

The lesson: know your specific audience, look at your stats and don’t generalize. Averages are dangerous.

One of our startups, Qeeglixtr™ is looking for VC funding – anywhere from $15M to $145M, please. We predict the market cap will be $8.75 Billion within 8 months, so this is actually a good deal, but you have to act now.

It’s a little hard to understand what Qeeglixtr™ will do but let me try to explain it: It is a beta SMS feed widget that uses a wiki-backend to collaboratively publish ajax-enabled API’s to semantically tag and integrate tagclouds in user-generated blogs, and podcasts that asynchronously posts skype messages back the user.

In short, you can use it to send a trackback to your grandma’s mobile blog anytime somebody on Facebook finds out you bought an x-rated amazon untube video. It will then let grandma send you an interactive-zwinky via skype that will then be tagged and mashed up with your last.fm tracks to appear on your half-life account as a youtube clip that you can then share with your friends.

It’s that simple. Pretty soon people will be saying, “remember the days before Qeeglixtr™ when we used to have to talk to people? That sucked. Grandma just pwned me.”

You can use Google to predict the demand ⁽¹⁾. There are 131,000 searches for “zwinky”, 600,000,000 searches for “SMS”, and 17,500,000 for Skype. Concordidly, 131,000 X 600,000,000 X 17,500,000 is something like 3.79 million billion dollars. Estimating that each user is worth $25, that equals … let’s just say a lot of money.

So any takers?

(1) Courtesy of Ali G’s ice cream glove mathematic theory

Thanks to Alex for the logo, and EB ventures for help with drafting the business plan. Also, our competitors who got covered in TechCrunch earlier today:

My Future of Web Apps post made the front page of Digg yesterday, so I got to learn what it’s like to ride the Digg wave. It was an interesting trip to say the least.

I posted the entry yesterday morning, Dugg it once myself, and messaged a few friends to check it out. I then went about my day and in the early afternoon came back to find my site was down. I checked Digg and there it was: #6 in the list. Whoo hoo!

A Diggaggle⁽¹⁾ had already started flaming the site in the comments for being down. Now I myself appreciated the irony of the article ending in “…Break Your Website”. However, I didn’t really anticipate it making the front page, especially when others in the blogosphere had better coverage of the event and had posted about it much earlier.

I emailed Dreamhost as soon as possible about the site being down and called up Duane (the other half of AU Interactive) to redirect the DNS to our own server so we could put up a temporary page. (This blog is hosted on a separate shared account which usually suffices for small projects.) My email to Dreamhost had the following subject line: “Site Dugg! Is Down! Please send reinforcements!” and body: “I just got Dugg! Site is down! Please help!”

I was a little surprised to get the following email back from them about 15 minutes later:

Can you please explain what Dugg is? It appears you are being DDOS’ed … Your apache server was using up almost all of the system resources … Server uptime: 5 minutes 57 seconds … Total accesses: 5675 - Total Traffic: 4.5 MB … CPU Usage: 93.3% CPU load. 15.9 requests/sec - 13.0 kB/second - 835 B/request … 250 requests currently being processed … in short it is crashing the server.

It was kind of unexpected that they weren’t aware of Digg and the “Digg Effect”– I sort of assumed that a large hosting company would be on top of things like this. They renamed the folder to prevent the server from crashing as a temporary fix.

As soon as the DNS propagated, our servers were taking a brunt of the hits – within about an hour, we had received 4,000+ unique visitors. Duane informed me that the page was pretty bloated (300K+). AHA! That was my mistake. I had installed a number of plugins without thinking too much about it and it really “obesified” my pages. I had the wp-cache plugin activated which helped, but the extra plugins, namely Lightbox V2 (which uses prototype and scriptaculous libraries, both of which are a bit hefty ) were really to blame.

So I took out the unnecessary JS and waited for the traffic to die down. Duane let me know when the server relaxed a bit so I renamed the folder back at Dreamhost and changed back the DNS to point to its proper home.

Later in the evening Dreamhost responded again, explaining the situation and noting that currently the server appeared to be having a normal level of traffic. This is the only problem I’ve ever had with them, so I’ll probably stick with them, even after this fiasco. Plus they have a nice affilate program. *wink*

Now I’m just moderating comments and having fun with it. Thank you to everyone who took the time to give their feedback. I’ll leave you with some fun screenshots from yesterday:

This is kind of funny: The Digg mirror advertising the very service that couldn’t handle the site traffic.

Yes, I just coined a new term:

Diggaggle: n. 1. A gaggle of Diggers. 2. A rowdy group of commenters who leave snide remarks. Usage: “I just had a pile of virtual poo tossed my way by a bloodthirsty Diggaggle” [Origin: 2006 from Digg (n.) social networking site, and gaggle (n.), a “flock of geese when not flying”. Hence Diggaggle: a “flock of geeks”.]

These are the top 10 things I learned from attending the Future of Web Apps Conference 2006 in San Francisco earlier this month. The summit was hosted by Carson Systems and included speakers like Kevin Rose, Mike Arrington, Mike Davidson, and more. It’s a condensed and aggregated summary of points covered by different speakers throughout the conference that I found most useful.

1. EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program.
   Discoverability – everything is easy to find, features meant to enhance, not distract – can still be advanced, as long as it’s easy. Recoverability – actions should be without cost (ex: Digg, UnDigg). The web is about fulfilling needs – create things that let people do this as easily as possible. Drive usage. Generate touchpoints for easy spreading – easy to tell friends, relentlessly remove barriers to account signups. Make the website easy to use. Then make it easier.
2. Visual design and copy are extremely important.
   Your credibility is at stake. Don’t have your coder do xhtml/css. Start with the design, then markup, then develop the backend. Obsess about your copy and how you communicate to your visitors via text to complement how you communicate with your visitors visually. Remove distractions and simplify.
3. Open up your data as much possible.
   The future is not in owning data. Expose every axis of your data for people to mash up. Get an API and release it out to the wild, but stay conscious of abuse, whether intentional or not (ex: newbie programmers unwittingly making 100 server requests/sec.) Offer an RSS feed for everything on your site.
4. Test, test, test.
   You can do your best to make educated guesses about what will work, but you will never know unless you create it and then test it. Create goals and measurements to be able to gauge progress. Good example: contrary to previous predictions, it looks like contextual ads don’t work well in RSS feeds. (Branding ads perform better). That was only known after testing. Then again, this may not apply to your niche – test, test, test!
5. Release features early and often.
   Start with a core set of features (and create plugins on top) – always know your end goals. Don’t offer “me too” features just to to have them – stay true to your core. Small increments show visible progress. If you stay personable and honest and set expectations, people will be a lot more receptive when things break. Ideally your development should be modular, incremental, and well documented to mitigate future problems.
6. Be special.
   Passion for what you are doing and creating is paramount. If you believe it, do it. Don’t let anyone else tell you that it’s not possible or shouldn’t be done. Create purple cows. Challenge the status quo. Do it against the odds and with little startup money. (Raising too much money can hurt you and make you lose focus.) Prove all your detractors wrong. Passion and a belief in yourself will get you through the rough times.
7. Don’t be special.
   Use common standards or open source frameworks whenever possible. Don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily. Also, try to share user databases, ecommerce systems, and other elements between your projects to prevent siloing.
8. If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability from the ground up.
   Anticipate growth and plan for problems ahead of time. Document everything. If you want a good real-world case study on scalability, check out Inside LiveJournal’s Backend (PDF). Find a top notch hardware partner if you don’t want to deal with the nitty gritty yourself.
9. Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away:
1. Microformats (opens up your data easily and contextually)
2. Adobe Apollo (deploy Rich Internet Applications easily)
3. Whobar (manage digital identity)
4. Akismet (stop comment spam)
10. User generated content and social software trends
    This is a bit of a catchall, but I’d like to list what has been working and not working in the user generated content space.
1. Not working:
1. Requiring participation from square 1. Not all users need to participate to generate social value.
2. Buying communities.
3. Social networks for the sake of social networks.
4. Wikipedia consensus model (many people contribute to one idea for the greater good) is not a good model in general and probably cannot be duplicated outside Wikipedia.
2. Working:
1. Giving users control, being open to different uses you did not anticipate.
2. Dunbar principle – segments of under 150 people.
3. The individual should get value and the organization should derive aggregated value from all the individuals.
4. Social sites have and need different types of users and each should be motivated/rewarded equally.
5. Many voices generate emergent order: you can get much value out of all that data.

There was a lot of other really good information and insight that I’ve not covered here. For more in-depth coverage and summary of each speaker’s contributions, check out Allen’s excellent summit notes and recap.

Hopefully by paying attention to these points you will make it to the winners list and void the losers list, next time Paul Scrivens does a roundup.

(Also, thanks to Copyblogger for guidance about writing a better headline.)

AdBrite is actually a CPM ad network (you pay for impressions, not clicks) so it’s not PPC but I will share my horrible experiences with them anyway since I tested AdBrite along with the other PPC systems in this series.

I setup an account with them several months ago and put in a very low CPM price for a single ad - at the time my maximum amount was too low to run anything on their partner sites, so nothing really happened. Since nothing was happening, I sort of forgot about my ad in their system.

Fast forward a few months later - I saw a massive amount of traffic to our site. I looked at the stats to try to figure out where it was all coming from and the referrers were all strange foreign sites (lots of Korean sites) - hundreds of them - most looked like foreign versions of MFA sites - some were not even sites, but cloaked pages, non-pages, ad pages, frames - just complete garbage. But they were sending our site a ridiculous amount of traffic.

Confused, I started digging deeper and logged into my AdBrite account. Lo and behold, my ads had gone active 3 days ago and I was being charged $100 per day for a total of $300. So I went from $0/day and 0 visitors to $100/day (my maximum) and thousands of visitors.

I called AdBrite and they told me that they had just changed some things in their system to “allow more exposure for our advertisers”. I asked them to refund my money since I was not told about this change, and all the traffic I had received was from spammy sites. They sent me the following response:

I spoke with you today regarding the clicks your ad received. We upgraded our system to optimize the ad servers and on Thursday we introduced those new filters, which is why you saw the increase in traffic. Looking at your network, it doesn’t look like there was any fraudulent activity going on, but you can send us any statistics and sites that you would like us to review. Let us know if you have any further questions.

I then proceeded to study my stats and make screenshots of the reports. Fun facts: A lot of the top referrers were not even websites but blank pages, 100% ad pages, redirects, etc. 50% of the traffic was coming from a single IP in Korea! When I contacted AdBrite again with the stats, they referred me to their quality control department and asked me to provide specifics, which I did. This was August 21st.

I followed up several times with them and was told that they were investigating the matter. One whole month later on September 22nd, I received the following email:

Thanks for writing. We have concluded the necessary research for the network ad in question. There was total of $101.64 invalid clicks generated in your network campaign. The invalid clicks has been refunded back to your credit card as requested.

So after a whole month of “investigation” I only got 1/3 of my money back. The methods they used to determine clicks? Who knows. Needless to say, I am not happy. My opinion of AdBrite: STAY AWAY FROM THEM.

As a bonus, on the bottom of their emails they usually had the following:

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: DFU-######
Department: Online Support
Priority: Low
Status: Closed

So I’m glad they considered my click fraud request LOW priority and considered it CLOSED even before it was resolved.

• PPC Network Overview
• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite