Meme Analysis

In the last five days I've been scrambling to provide bandwidth for the more than 50,000 requests for a piece of viral media I unleashed on Saturday. I've got some stories to share about how I dealt with its popularity, but before I post those I thought I'd share some numbers about how it's spread.

In the first hour, we had 100 hits. The next hour saw 253. It bounced around between 150 and 300 hits/hour until waxy.org picked it up. Then it increased to 500, briefly. Between waxy and sites like daypop, blogdex, and blogwars (an aggregator of "unsavory content" that was one of the first to carry the link), traffic stayed around 500 hits/hour with peaks as the various blog indexes came online.

Then it dropped off to between 100 and 200 hits/hour until boingboing picked it up. If anyone doubts boingboing's power as a meme transmitter, doubt no longer. A link from boingboing has been worth over 7500 direct hits in just 36 hours, and that's not counting those through bloglines. That's in comparison to around 3000 from blogwars, and 1000 each from waxy.org and blogdex. And they're still coming. As this graph shows, they're still coming.

Next post I'll describe how to survive being linked-to from a site like boingboing or Slashdot ...