Breaking Through the Popularity Threshold

This post reveals how little I know about internet marketing, but I'm only saying I'm only trying to be a programmer, so hopefully it won't hurt too much.

In early March the Control.Tabs script was posted to Ajaxian which was in a way the birth of this site. I got a decent traffic spike off of that, and just as it was dying down someone posted it to Digg. I got about 900 diggs in the next 24 hours and (to me anyway) a fairly impressive number of visitors.

Naively, when I released the Control.Modal script, I assumed by submitting to Digg I assumed I could get a similar response. Only 32 diggs to date. What was baffling to me was that the Control.Modal script generated far more emails, use cases and positive responses. What amazes me, and triggered me to jot this all down was that to date, despite many other releases and many many links from sites large and small I still get more traffic to the Control.Tabs page than every other page combined.

I've read a few articles on the theory behind internet marketing and popularity, but unfortunately none are even worth citing. From everything I can gather there is this a not so mysterious, but hard to explain critical mass effect in the blogosphere that isn't terribly predictable.

Anybody got some good reading on this?

Posted May 15th, 2007 at 12:38 pm by Ryan in Opinion