Traffic

When I originally wrote the Matrix Name Generator, I always thought in the back of my mind how cool it would be if the thing took off in popularity, but I never really believed that would happen.

Yesterday, the 9th, traffic on my site jumped from around 1500 hits per day to over 41,000 hits all in one day—I was floored with this jaw-dropping fact this afternoon, when I reviewed the site log files, and disconcertingly noticed that the log file jumped from 1.5 megabytes (for Saturday) to 19.5 megabytes (for Sunday).

Holy. Shit.

Nothing—and I mean nothing—has happened like that before. Totally out of the blue. I thought at first I’d been Slashdotted somehow, but when I started reviewing the gargantuan log file, I noticed that it was all for the Matrix Name page.

Where are they coming from? Three main sources:

LiveJournal sites. Apparently I’ve been picked up by some sort of LiveJournal community, where everybody is on everybody else’s friend list and is linking to the page. I haven’t been Slashdotted, I’ve been LJ’d!

Forums. Similar to the LJ sites, people have been posting the link to the page on various forums, and everybody reading that post has followed the link to see what their Matrix Name is.

Webmail, like Yahoo! Mail and EudoraMail. This tells me that a lot of people have been emailing the link to friends. Likely the same LJ users and forum readers.

I guess it took a few days for the latest Matrix movie to hit critical mass, and I’m now prevalent enough in the search engines that I’m getting hit, hard. For instance, my page is the number 1 result on Google for “matrix name” and “what is my matrix name“.

So what do I do? Ride it out, I guess, and hope my bandwidth stays affordable in the meantime. Otherwise, welcome, Matrix name seekers!

Comments

9 responses to “Traffic”

  1. Jeremy C. Wright Avatar

    Please save yourself some headache and run Adsense as well as a banner campaign on there. You’d have made more than 100$ as a result of CPM (banner) and CPC (AdSense)!

  2. Jon Avatar

    D’oh! The worst part is, I thought I *did* have AdSense on that page, since I have it on the rest of the site. Shit. Oh well, fixed it now.

  3. Ink Avatar
    Ink

    That’s my matrix name..what does it mean??hehe..it’s been on buletin boards all over friendster..really cool man. 🙂

  4. Winter Ink Avatar

    thats both my matrix name when i did the test twice.. =) AND im definitely not the ink person who wrote the earlier comment.. =) anyhoo.. how did the hits jumped so fast? check out friendster man.. its all over the bulletin boards! tts another reason to add to your list dude!

  5. Echo Avatar
    Echo

    it’s all over friendster… woot! how do you generate the names? randomly?!

  6. Jon Avatar

    "Ink" is a liquid substance, typically put in writing implements such as pens, that allow people to mark glyphs and symbols onto surfaces of objects… 🙂

    Seriously, I just liked "Ink" because it has a bunch of connotations for writing, knowledge, information, creativity, and it’s typically black, which fits into the Matrix motif well 🙂

  7. Jon Avatar

    Friendster… that explains a lot, actually.

    The names actually rely on how you answer the questionnaire–how you answer will determine your appropriate Matrix name. The way I came up with them in the first place was semi-random though.

  8. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    Knock. Knock. Jon…
    This is Opportunity

    RUNNING TRACEKILL
    PORT FAILURE
    SYSTEM SHUTDOWN
    —————–
    Use dat shit yo!

  9. stimulantfeline Avatar
    stimulantfeline

    Actually…I got the link from a chatroom. Its been going around those for a couple of days now. Mine was Echo…cool.