The TechCrunch Effect

The most effective way is to get a referral from a venture capitalist or someone “known” who can speak on your behalf. Ten per come per day this way. Thirty plus ten equals forty, and he runs four stories per day, so you might think that ten percent make it. However, many of his stories are internally generated (followups, reports on what big companies do, etc.), so the actual percentage is much less.

If your site is no good, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you have: in fact, getting a whole bunch of traffic, whether through Digg, or TechCrunch, or whatever, is like a test. If you can’t convert all that traffic into regular users (or buyers — but, let’s face it, very few web2.0 startups actually sell anything other than advertising) then it doesn’t matter that you got covered because it needs to be Good to retain traffic anyway.

Here is the Compete Unique Visitors metric for Mashable, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, ReadWriteWeb and MakeUseOf for the last one year. As you can see, Mashable’s traffic overtook that of TechCrunch and Lifehacker in May 2009.

We just got featured on TechCrunch, and of course, the effect was that traffic went through the roof. We had a fairly decent number of folks asking us questions, and a good number of people wanting a trial account. So- thank you, TechCrunch, for this opportunity and exposure. We’re very grateful(inspite of my usual bitchy behavior w/ M.A.).

I work with many entrepreneurs, and most of them believe that getting covered by TechCrunch will “make” the company. Don’t get me wrong, TechCrunch coverage is a very good thing, but it’s one part of a successful introduction. The same is true of getting on the Digg front page, by the way. If you’re about to launch a new product or service, and your fantasy is TechCrunch coverage, you must read this. If you’re a PR firm, you must forward this. Bottom line: a successful product is a process, not an event.

You should try and get covered on Techcrunch. It is very good for traffic but as you can see the numbers are not as big as some might think. The key is catching some of the traffic through RSS or Facebook so as they keep coming back to your site in the future. Companies should try and get coverage in Techcrunch and similar sites as part of their marketing plan and not as their entire marketing plan, you will quickly be forgotten.

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Drudge Report, Twitter and Digg, leading to terms such as being Farked or Drudged and the Digg effect.

This appears to be an expansion of the Slashdot effect, the phenomenon in which waves of traffic from a link on Slashdot crashes the recipient site. As Digg has grown into a major traffic driver, many sites have reported a similar Digg Effect. Now it seems we’re seeing a similar effect in which sites whose launch announcements are featured on prominent blogs are quickly overwhelmed with traffic. It’s not quite the “TechCrunch Effect,” but that blog seems to serve as the leading edge of this traffic wave, as links on TechCrunch are quickly picked up and other blogs link to the featured site.

In addition to their Blogs, TechCrunch holds over a dozen website properties including CrunchBase (database driven) and popular tech conference, TechCrunch50. The level of maintenance had become very high and they were utilizing one full time person to administer their servers. Trying to handle traffic spikes among various dedicated servers was not a task they wanted to deal with anymore and it was time to look for another option. They also quickly reached bandwidth and computing resource limitations in their old set up, and consequently performance decreased proportionally.

Robert Scoble sits down with Nik Cubrilovic, Chief Technology Officer of Techcrunch at their offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

I will recount the days following our launch, the cocaine like high and subsequent crash of the Techcrunch effect, the final analysis on whether Riya's technology worked, the feedback we recieved from users, the competitors we beat (at least in traffic), the flaw in the Riya business strategy we uncovered, the crisis it precipitated, the concern I developed for the entire Web 2.0 industry as the numbers rolled in, the search for a new strategy as Azhar, Burak, and I sat in a conference room for almost 10 days straight, the customer data that lead us to a counter-web 2.0 and counter intuitive strategy, the board meeting and debate about it, and the first execution around it.

I see many consumer Internet pitches these days where the basic marketing strategy is to (1) get covered by Techcrunch, (2) get tens of thousands of users from the "Techcrunch Bump", and then (3) "grow virally". While a positive Techcrunch review has the potential to send thousands of consumers your way, it does not represent a marketing plan.

So what did this coverage do for earFeeder? Well, quite a bit. I demo'd earFeeder for the first time in public on October 3rd at the Boulder New Tech Meetup. TechCrunch wrote about it on October 16th (less than 2 weeks later). LifeHacker followed up with a story 2 days later, exposing earFeeder to half a million people in a two week period. About 100 other blogs then covered it in the following days, and about a million people in total had been sneezed on. A hell of a lot of them came to the site. Then, just 39 days after I showed it for the first time in Boulder, and just 26 days after TechCrunch covered it, earFeeder was acquired by SonicSwap.