The Memoirs were viewed 170000 times yesterday, an analysis or a follow-up post on Modern HDR Photography part III

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This is a follow-up post to my previous post which was viewed over 167000 in the span of a few hours. This is part of a series of articles on HDR photography. This article continues the initial analysis and examines in further detail what happened. This article can also be seen as a continued photographical revuew of HDR photography since all images included are HDR photos.

1. Modern HDR photography, a how-to
2. How The Memoirs got 167000 hits in few hours…
3. The Memoirs were viewed 170000 times yesterday <- You are here
4. Understanding modern HDR Photography, a set of tools, links, examples and explanations

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This is the 3^rd article in a series. The 1^st article was a guide to Modern HDR photography. The second article delved into how that article had been viewed 167000 times in a day. This article examines the why, how exactly did the mechanics of this article make it so popular. You can also see this article as a further revue of HDR Photography, since all photos included here are HDR photos. The next article in this series will continue further tools and techniques for HDR photography. All the photos in this post were found in the HDR pool from flickr. Please visit it or click on the images to see them at full size.

 

Just a quick update on the state of things, this article has been viewed a total of 170000 times since yesterday. The Memoirs are #3 in the Top Blogs of WordPress, and the 1^st article in this series was the 1^st post on WordPress. The article in question has been saved by 141 different people to del.icio.us and has moved down to #29 spot on the Reddit front page. The total views of this blog are up to 185000. They were at 14000 before I posted the 1^st article.

Before I start, I just wanted to mention that this analysis is in hindsight. I had no idea that this post would get so much attention. I did what I always did when writing a post. I included images from flickr that I found interesting that pertained to the subject at hand and submitted it to NowPublic and Reddit. I do not use digg because for some reason the URL of this blog has been banned. So the amount of hits I got is even more astounding since I did not use digg, which has been the main memedigger for some time in technology.

 

This lets us believe that the crowd or mob mentality behind memediggers has been fractured somewhat. Different diggers appeal to different people. Some people prefer Reddit to digg, some people only use Popurls since it aggregates information for the most popular memediggers.

Popurls definitely deserves a closer look, since it combines the aspects of all the memediggers in one single customizable page glance.

 

Now let’s get into the details, why this article became so popular and how to duplicate this for yourself. For starters, you have to pay attention to the subject that you write about. If I take Marc Fawzi’s example over at Evolving Trends, his article on Wikipedia 3.0 the End of Google was read a total of 55000 in the span of a few days. This article may be somewhat technical. Marc played around with the title in order to generate some attention by the memedigger digg. However, he ran into some problems trying to duplicate this. This article did please his intended viewing audience, however it does not have a mass market appeal. Programmers and aficionados of web 2.0 aren’t that many. Sure there are a lot of people who enjoy reading this, but the layperson will simply get tired of the technicalities and go back reading something else.

When choosing a subject that you want to get a lot of exposure and views, choose something that will appeal to the layperson. From this standpoint, you can see that photography is a good subject. Why? There are a lot of amateur photographers out there. Just look at the number of people using flickr. Since I feature a photographer on every post, every day, I had already started building up a core group of readers who enjoyed this aspect. Also to enjoy photography, you can be a professional, you can be an amateur, or you can be the guy who takes pictures of your family.

 

Photography has a broad range appeal.

If you examine my original post and other of my posts, you will see that I include media in all of them. I have stopped writing plain articles, I illustrate every single one of them. Why? I enjoy photography, being an amateur photographer myself, I like seeing interesting pictures. And since exploring flickr isn’t the easiest process, if someone takes the time to select good photos of flickr, it’s an added bonus. Just look at the site bestofflickr and flickrnation and others that do this.

 

1) Choose a broad range subject that will appeal to the layperson

2) Use language and words that are easily understandable and don’t need to be looked up, use straightforward language if possible

3) Research it and illustrate it fully if possible

4) Add your own comments, recommendations

5) Inform your target audience about this post

6) Submit it to a few memediggers, from digg, Reddit, NowPublic, ShoutWire, Slashdot and others

7) If you generated some traffic through memediggers, submit the article to the rest of the memediggers.

8) Do follow-up articles if the process was successful

 

My analysis of the whole situation is as follows. I have now examined part of the mechanics that made the original article so popular. I was successful in creating a buzz around it, even though I hadn’t intended it.

When traffic started pouring in yesterday afternoon, I had only submitted the article to Reddit and NowPublic. Later on, I did submit it to the other memediggers that I knew of, from Slashdot to ShoutWire. This sustained the traffic until around midnight last night. Today, traffic is about at 3000 page views and continues to rise steadily. The rate is naturally less impressive than yesterday, however, I am sure that it will rise a bit more over the next few days, never attaining the original high of Saturday, but still moving onward. Normal traffic for The Memoirs is between 300 and 500 page views every day.

 

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Previous: How The Memoirs got 167000 hits in few hours…

Next: Understanding modern HDR Photography, a set of tools, links, examples and explanations

 

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