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Oddly enough, I worked on a project that had a whole show dedicated to a site that I built. There were banner ads on Oprah's website and a bumper in the show wi

Oddly enough, I worked on a project that had a whole show dedicated to a site that I built. There were banner ads on Oprah's website and a bumper in the show with the URL on it. My boss and I sat watching and waiting and we saw virtually no effect from the show whatsoever. (If you were just watching top on the servers without knowing Oprah was talking about it, you would have assumed it was any other day.) We spent time theorizing why this was. We came up with the following: - The site that we built has a relatively long URL, so maybe it was hard to remember. - The bumper that the URL appear at was towards the end of the show, at which point we figured most stay at home moms/dads/people that watch Oprah were probably starting to get dinner ready. - I'm not sure that people that watch Oprah are the same people that eagerly sit in front of the TV with an iPad/laptop/etc. Of course, your mileage may vary. If you're using Rackspace, I'd say you're in good hands. It may be worth mentioning to them when it's going to happen and seeing what they can do in case of sudden load, but for us it certainly wasn't the huge gush we were expecting/hoping for.

omarchowdhury 16y ago
Oh well. Still, your company can leverage "As seen on Oprah" for a conversion boost.
bradleyland 16y ago
I had the same experience. We had a customer whose cookies were mentioned on Oprah and then Rachel Ray at a later date. We saw a bump in traffic, but the customer didn't warn us until a few days before air, so our recommendation was to leave the site alone rather than risk introducing changes that could produce bugs. We put a little time in to tweaking the site's error pages to be more friendly, but when the air dates came, nothing spectacular happened. We actually saw a little bit more traffic from Rachel Ray than Oprah, probably because cookies are a more relevant topic for her show.

omarchowdhury 16y ago

Oh well. Still, your company can leverage "As seen on Oprah" for a conversion boost.

bradleyland 16y ago

I had the same experience. We had a customer whose cookies were mentioned on Oprah and then Rachel Ray at a later date. We saw a bump in traffic, but the customer didn't warn us until a few days before air, so our recommendation was to leave the site alone rather than risk introducing changes that could produce bugs. We put a little time in to tweaking the site's error pages to be more friendly, but when the air dates came, nothing spectacular happened. We actually saw a little bit more traffic from Rachel Ray than Oprah, probably because cookies are a more relevant topic for her show.