Anatomy of a Wildly Popular Website
The other day I stumbled across a successful website called, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that does about 40 GB of traffic (including hotlinks) every single day. The site was created as a response to the whole Intelligent Design issue.
Many of you are interested in developing strategies to creating massively popular sites (for lucre, links, or love), so the following story of this hyper-successful website (PR 7, in case you were wondering) may be of interest.
Creating a website to react to controversy or a current event is one of the oldest methods for
receiving links. Blogs fit into this plan very nicely. The following is the anatomy of a website created purely for the passion of it. It was not created for links or monetary benefit. Nevertheless it has accomplished what thousands of link hungry money grubbing webmasters aspire to every day. Ha!
So let's take a peek behind the scenes of a wildly successful site that also makes decent change. The following is an interview with Bobby Henderson, the man behind the site.
Can you give me a little history of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website?
The site was never planned. "the letter" had been written and sent
off - with no reply - for months before it occurred to me to post it
online.
Have you ever built a website before, what is your web background?
I made a website for the Roseburg, Oregon school district (www.roseburg.k12.or.us) when I was in high school.
With the FSM site, I want things to be as plain and non-shiny as possible. Screw aesthetics. I don't want it to look slick and well-designed at all. I prefer it to be just slapped together, with
new content added frequently. I love it when people give me tips to make the site better. It's received well over 100million hits at this point, so maybe there's something to this content-instead-of-shinyness thing. I've noticed that Maddox has the same sort of idea, with similar results.
What made you decide to build your website?
The idea of a Flying Spaghetti Monster was completely random. I wrote the letter at about 3am one night, for no particular reason other than I couldn't sleep. And there must have been something in news about ID that day.
After posting the letter online, it was "discovered" almost immediately. It got boingboing'ed within a couple weeks, and blew up from there. I've done zero "promotion". Promotion is fake. None of the site was planned, it has evolved over the months. Same with the whoring-out, the t-shirts,etc. None of that stuff was my idea. People asked for it, so I put it up. I can remember telling a friend that I would be shocked if one person bought a t-shirt. Now there have been around 20k sold.
To what do you attribute the support of your site from so many people?
I believe the support for the FSM project comes from spite.. there are a lot of us annoyed at these ID nuts. FSM out-googles the Discovery Institute for "intelligent design" now: #5 vs #9. That's what they get.
I get 100-200 emails a day. Depends on the news, though. I got maybe 300 emails about that "pirate" attack on the cruise-ship. Incidentally, the reason we saw no change in global weather was because they were not real pirates. Real pirates don't have machine guns and speedboats. (editors note: The FSM dogma asserts a connection between pirates and global warming)
Were you surprised at how the site took off?
Yes of course I'm surprised the site took off. And it blows my mind that it's still alive. Yesterday was the highest-traffic day yet, with 3.5 million hits (most of those hits were hotlinked images).
What advice do you have to others who have a site they want to promote?
Advice. . . ok .. here's something. A lot of people go out of their way to stop hotlinking. I go out of my to allow it - going so far as paying for the extra bandwidth to let people steal my stuff. Why?
It's all part of the propaganda machine. It would be easy enough to prevent people from hotlinking FSM images. But I WANT people to see my propaganda, so why not allow it?
It's like advertising, requiring zero effort by me. I am paying for about 40GB in bandwidth every day in just hijacked images - and it's totally worth it, because now the Flying Spaghetti Monster is everywhere.
Seeing how your deity is a flying spaghetti monster, I am curious... do you like spaghetti?
No comment
Many of you are interested in developing strategies to creating massively popular sites (for lucre, links, or love), so the following story of this hyper-successful website (PR 7, in case you were wondering) may be of interest.
Creating a website to react to controversy or a current event is one of the oldest methods for
receiving links. Blogs fit into this plan very nicely. The following is the anatomy of a website created purely for the passion of it. It was not created for links or monetary benefit. Nevertheless it has accomplished what thousands of link hungry money grubbing webmasters aspire to every day. Ha!So let's take a peek behind the scenes of a wildly successful site that also makes decent change. The following is an interview with Bobby Henderson, the man behind the site.
Can you give me a little history of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website?
The site was never planned. "the letter" had been written and sent
off - with no reply - for months before it occurred to me to post it
online.
Have you ever built a website before, what is your web background?
I made a website for the Roseburg, Oregon school district (www.roseburg.k12.or.us) when I was in high school.
With the FSM site, I want things to be as plain and non-shiny as possible. Screw aesthetics. I don't want it to look slick and well-designed at all. I prefer it to be just slapped together, with
new content added frequently. I love it when people give me tips to make the site better. It's received well over 100million hits at this point, so maybe there's something to this content-instead-of-shinyness thing. I've noticed that Maddox has the same sort of idea, with similar results.
What made you decide to build your website?
The idea of a Flying Spaghetti Monster was completely random. I wrote the letter at about 3am one night, for no particular reason other than I couldn't sleep. And there must have been something in news about ID that day.
After posting the letter online, it was "discovered" almost immediately. It got boingboing'ed within a couple weeks, and blew up from there. I've done zero "promotion". Promotion is fake. None of the site was planned, it has evolved over the months. Same with the whoring-out, the t-shirts,etc. None of that stuff was my idea. People asked for it, so I put it up. I can remember telling a friend that I would be shocked if one person bought a t-shirt. Now there have been around 20k sold.
To what do you attribute the support of your site from so many people?
I believe the support for the FSM project comes from spite.. there are a lot of us annoyed at these ID nuts. FSM out-googles the Discovery Institute for "intelligent design" now: #5 vs #9. That's what they get.
I get 100-200 emails a day. Depends on the news, though. I got maybe 300 emails about that "pirate" attack on the cruise-ship. Incidentally, the reason we saw no change in global weather was because they were not real pirates. Real pirates don't have machine guns and speedboats. (editors note: The FSM dogma asserts a connection between pirates and global warming)
Were you surprised at how the site took off?
Yes of course I'm surprised the site took off. And it blows my mind that it's still alive. Yesterday was the highest-traffic day yet, with 3.5 million hits (most of those hits were hotlinked images).
What advice do you have to others who have a site they want to promote?
Advice. . . ok .. here's something. A lot of people go out of their way to stop hotlinking. I go out of my to allow it - going so far as paying for the extra bandwidth to let people steal my stuff. Why?
It's all part of the propaganda machine. It would be easy enough to prevent people from hotlinking FSM images. But I WANT people to see my propaganda, so why not allow it?
It's like advertising, requiring zero effort by me. I am paying for about 40GB in bandwidth every day in just hijacked images - and it's totally worth it, because now the Flying Spaghetti Monster is everywhere.
Seeing how your deity is a flying spaghetti monster, I am curious... do you like spaghetti?
No comment
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