At KTVB, we recently ran the story of a man who was sitting on a small medical plane when the window next to him blew out at 20,000 feet, and he found himself half in and half out of the plane (he survived). We posted the story and the man’s uncut interview, and immediately saw strong traffic from our local market. It quickly made the homepage of Fark. Sister-site KING5.com ran the story as well, and their version hit the homepage of Digg. Between the two sites, the story has been viewed more than 120,000 times. EBaumsWorld.com picked up the story from Fark – and we’ve now seen more views from this “second wave” than the original links.
There’s a downside. I love that the viral attention drives up unique user and pageview counts – but its a little bit like a quick high. The folks surfing in from Digg aren’t likely interested in local advertisers – and actually drag down our pageview to unique user count – since they are usually only good for one or two pageviews per month. What do you think? Is viral traffic good for building business?
