Getting Soulsided: The Gift and the Curse

Dec 20, 2005

Getting Soulsided: The Gift and the Curse · by Rafi Kam

On December 6, Oliver Wang became my favorite person when he posted a very positive message endorsing Oh Word to his readers over at soul-sides.com.

Sure, we had some nice shine thrown our way just days after we launched from Cocaine Blunts and that brought in a lot of traffic in September. But something was different this time.

For one thing, we’d amassed a lot more content. We were sometimes missing our lofty goal of new features or reviews content every week but we had done a pretty good job of sticking to it. The material was starting to accumulate and so was the audio we were attaching to every article. Our traffic was building up too. In November the amount of visitors was rising steadily even before the spike we enjoyed from the November 29 post at So Many Shrimp.

What we hadn’t realized is that we were creating the foolish webmaster’s equivalent of the “perfect storm”. Here we had roughly 150 mp3’s available for downloading attached to related articles and reviews. Our following was growing and we were now attracting the attention and appreciation of audio-bloggers whose whole target audience is made up of people looking for mp3’s.

I couldn’t believe it when we had easily matched our typical day’s worth of hits by 10:30am that morning. All day the hits kept coming. Eventually netting us 7,600 page views on Dec 6. This was a fairly decent week for us all in one day. O-Dub’s reach must be ill. It didn’t end on the first day. We still saw around 5,000 pages on Dec 7, high 3,000s on Dec 8. Even as the numbers tapered off we were still living large compared to our usual benchmark.

Then one evening I visited Oh Word and I see this message there saying “Suspended Domain”. It turns out that in 3 short days we had used up all of our bandwidth allocation for the month. In past months it was typical for us to be using up about half our bandwidth for 30 days. Here it was all gone in 3.

It’s like we’ve been slashdotted on a miniature scale, I told myself and anyone who would listen. Slashdot is a tech news site with such a large and ravenous following that it has been known to unintentionally crash many a small site by making them the focus of a news post. The droves of geeks heading to the site can tie up the web server’s resources or bandwidth. Thus spawned a new phenomenon: the Slashdot effect. And here we were, not Slashdotted but Soulsided, our meager 30GB of bandwidth eaten up in 3 days.

Aside from Slashdot it also got me thinking about this post from Scott Andrew about how the results of exposure depend on context. Scott details how an unknown band became the MySpace band of the week, acquired tons of traffic to their page, made many new MySpace friends but failed to sell a single cd. Seth Godin’s thoughts on this sum up an important point related to the Soulsiding: “People go to Amazon to buy stuff. They go to MySpace for free stuff and to explore.”

Or in other words, your behavior is pretty much set based on your expectations of what you will find. Our bandwidth was gobbled up in those 3 days at a rate that was twenty times our usual for bandwidth. But we were only seeing about five times the usual page-views. Why such a big difference? Because the OhWord audience prior to December 6 was probably here at least as much for the articles as for the bandwidth-costly mp3 files. But the large crowd of loyal soul-sides readers are accustomed to their destination being a trouble-free repository for great mp3’s. Naturally they rolled up to OhWord via O-Dub’s endorsement with the same expectation.

The stats back this up with 90% of the bandwidth costs from that period going to MP3s. That usage included some 500 downloads or nearly 1.5Gb for “For My People” by Large Professor, a song that Oliver singled out as a gem at the end of his post.

We buckled under the ol’ bum rush and then there were some issue where our host kept re-suspending us every night. But they were pretty cool in general about it. The audio links are back up now. We just moved the site over the past weekend to a new server with a higher bandwidth quota. Still, starting in January, we will start expiring MP3 links that have been up for over a month. We’ve also just learned about using Coral CDN for mp3’s to cut bandwidth use and so far it’s been a breeze. If I had only known about that before we were victims of the Soulsides Effect.

Edit 12/20 7:15am
By the way, I’d like to send a big thank you to noz, Serg, O-Dub and Hashim for the posts. And also to everyone who has passed the word along via email, im, forum post or blog. We’re truly prepared this time so yes go ahead. Blow us the fuck up!

Comments for "Getting Soulsided: The Gift and the Curse"

BIG TINGS RAFI
BIG TINGS
— Beek Dec 20, 10:43 AM
Don’t forget that while many of us that came from the SoulSides recommendation might love our MP3s, we do love the reviews/articles, too. Our incredible rate of downloading is probably more of a factor that you had so many songs available that were new to us. I can only guess that the rate will decrease, too, since we will now be like a normal OhWord user and just be checking out the new MP3s.
Oh, “For My People” is so smooth.
— Sean Dec 20, 06:05 PM
keep building man, good stuff
— sankofa Dec 21, 09:54 AM
props on the increased traffic, you guys are doing go things. but man you guys were leaving up mp3’s with no expiration? that’s crazy talk. my general rule is to host no more than 5 mp3’s at a time and no longer than a week. 30 days is pretty nice, I tend to tell people to fuck off when they ask for reups after a week.
— Serg Dec 23, 07:36 PM