August 30, 2000
We went from an average of 180 visitors a day to a high of 122,470 visitors on the day of the finale show (in 24 hours).
My name's Conrad Walton, owner of Walton Communications. Mike at Survivor Software is one of my clients. They make the best checking account and money management software for Macintosh. My URL is walton.com and I hope they don't have a remake of that series...
I've had this URL since July 7th, 1995. I made a web site for Mike for free so I could have a portfolio to get other clients. I noticed an increase in the hits the server was taking a few weeks ago and wondered why. I saw a lot of "cbs.survivor.com" hits. I've seen "cancer.survivor.com" or "soul.survivor.com" in the past. I was wondering what the heck "cbs.survivor.com" could be. Cerebral Bronchitis Syndrome survivor?
I finally put up a questionnaire to ask people why they were hitting the site. Before I finished testing it, I had 2 people answer, saying it's the TV show. That seemed like fun, I thought. I put up a link to their official site for a week and took a lot of hits.
I sent off an email to the address on the CBS web site, asking if they wanted to advertise on our site. I never heard anything back. by the second week, I wondered how many people were "clicking thru" my link. I created a second page to track them. You click on the link on the front page, it goes to the second page, then redirects you to the official page. A ton of people were clicking thru. This doubled my page hit numbers. You can see it in the stats.
By the third week, the novelty had worn off. I was tired of serving pages that used up my bandwidth for nothing. I created a new page with no graphics that just said "sorry, it ain't here". I didn't realized that Mike had gotten some email complaining about me removing the link. I was hoping to hear from CBS, but never did. I put back up a referral page so people could go to the real site.
I considered putting up a page with Gilligan's island photos, but I'd probably get tagged with copyright infringement. I think next week I'll put up a form to enter your credit card number and pay $5.00 to go to the original site. It's all very bizarre.
By the third week, it was just a straight page, with no graphics. The total page hit, the total number of unique people who clicked on this site, was 18,035 and the total hits was 26,804. I also noticed a number of people who were looking for "abc.survivor.com" (161) and "nbc.survivor.com" (105). I guess if you're gonna miss a URL, then miss it big.
I think it's pretty funny. Gilligan may end up on the page yet. I was also thinking about putting up fake stories about people on an island, never claiming to be the real thing or even be related to the TV show. It'd be funny to publish a parody. I don't know what's going to happen.
Updated June 21, 2000 - After my conversation with CBS this morning, I don't think it's funny anymore. I know I won't be doing a parody or anything that could get me into any legal entanglements. I'd tell you more about the discussion, but I don't want to get sued. Sorry.
Looks like the only way we'll make any money is if people click on our banner ads. We had some cheesy banner ads for a while, but then we found the ones we have now. They're pretty cool. Please support us by supporting them.
Updated June 26, 2000 - I redesigned the whole site. It was my first commercial site 5 years ago and I hadn't touched it since. Redid the look in 3 hours. I've also been getting calls from reporters. Here's a story on us from Inside.com
We got over 80,000 hits last week. The front page of http://www.inside.com/says that CBS increased their web site hits by 183,000 last week. We got almost half of what they increased. They still haven't asked for a banner ad. Here's the story, about half way down the page.
Updated July 12, 2000 - I made a deal with an advertiser where they pay me for this real annoying pop up advertising window if you just leave the page. Since you came to read my story, I'll warn you that you really don't want to go back to the front page, but if you do, click on one of the banner ads to get off without the annoying window. (If only CBS had paid us for a banner ad...)
Also, the link to cbs.survivor.com is not the right link to the real site. It's only for people who can't read.
Updated August 9, 2000 - I guess I should have kept up with this page better. I appreciate you all writing, asking what was the latest.
About 4 weeks ago, I was at BBQ at a friends house on Wednesday night. When I got home, about 10:00pm, I discovered that my server had maxed out it's connections and quit serving for about 4 hours. Looks like we lost about 20,000 people during that time. I've since reset the configuration on my server from 128 concurrent connections to 500 concurrent connections and have had no problems with it since.
I did want to mention that this is all run on an old Macintosh using WebStar for a webserver.
A few weeks ago, I'm sure you all heard about the great Gervase discovery. Someone poked around the CBS web site and found that Gervase was the only photo in a set that did not have a red X on it. After my dealing with the people at CBS, I figured they were dumber than I thought. I, on my own volition, put up a "Gervase wins the million!" banner. I didn't realize the tremendous backlash this would create.
I don't like the show (I guess it's a personal issue at this point :-), so I figured no one else would really care, or at least they would see the humor in it. Do you believe everything you read on the web, especially things that are deliberately vague on pages that specifically state that they are not related to what they're talking about?
Seems that some people didn't understand my sense of humor. Mike got numerous angry phone calls. I'm talking about people who were actually yelling at him and calling him names with 4 letters. I got a bunch of obscene email. Calm down! - It's just TV! Mike was not amused and told me to take it down. I'm sorry I caused him the grief, but I really expected more from the American public. I won't do that again.
That week had the highest number of hits. We had 222,570 hits that week. 66,786 of them came on that Thursday. Since then, it's tapered off a bit. 180,964 total the next week, then last week was 178.097. We had 631,998 (yes, over half a million) for the entire month of August.
We've had requests for radio and newspaper interviews. I've turned down the radio ones so far because I don't do morning shows. Way too early. A friend called me and told me that KKLA in Los Angeles was talking about me and the site. She was amazed when she heard my name on the radio. I guess our 15 minutes of fame isn't up yet. The AP is supposed to call me later today. The Baltimore Sun published this article Sunday, Aug. 6th. http://www.sunspot.net/content/archive/story?section=archive&pagename=story&storyid=1150410204811
If you see an article about us or hear something on the radio, please let us know.
Later that day- I got interviewed by the AP reporter. He did a very good job of asking me questions and getting my story. Should be out on Thursday, 8-10. I hope I didn't sound stupid. Then I got an email that I posted on the front page with an appraisal for the domain name. Wow. Hope that's for real. If anyone out there is interested, send me some email. :-)
Updated August 10, 2000 - I added a link to a friend's web site. He's got a whole parody thing going on, including a store that sells CDs and tee shirts. Check him out.
WE GOT PUBLISHED! A reported from the AP called me and we had a nice little chat yesterday. He was a really nice guy. Did a good job asking good questions. He published a story about the site today! The article is well written. I'm impressed. I'm so excited! Check it out. This is the version on Yahoo. I'm sure it will be all over everywhere now.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000810/tc/lost_survivors_1.html
Updated August 11, 2000 - So, I'm sitting there answering email and I notice the server getting really busy. I look at the monitor window and notice "abc" and "millionaire". I look closer. It seems that from 8:16am to 8:31am this morning, a banner ad on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire site was pointing at survivor.com. Then it quit. Thanks for the extra hits, whoever you are!
Updated August 19, 2000 - Been a heck of a week. I went out of town for some training, unrelated to this site, and the day after I left, the server starts acting up. Turns out the hard drive was going bad. I tried to walk someone through fixing things over the phone, which worked for a while, but the drive was too far gone. I got home, put a new drive in it and we're back up and running. We've been up and down for most of last week. I'm glad we're back up for the final week. It's going to be interesting what happens in the next 7 days.
Updated August 21, 2000 - I realized tonight who will take home the million bucks! It's obvious, right in front of your face. It's Thurston Howell, "The Millionaire"!
Updated August 24, 2000 - Fat Naked Guy Wins! Well, Rich is rich. Unbelievable. I was rooting for Rudy. He's still my hero. Rich wasn't a bad choice. He was a player and he played to win.
Man, it's over. I can hardly believe it. This has consumed my life for 3 months now, not because I was a fan, but just because of the unique opportunity and the huge load on my systems. My brush with fame was not like I had expected it would be. Now, It's like a load off my shoulders and kind of depressing, now that it's over. I plan to go away for a romantic weekend with my wonderful wife and try to forget all of this.
Yesterday was the all time record breaker for hits. Previous record was the Gervase week, when I got 66,786 people on Thursday. Yesterday, from midnight to midnight, I got 122,470 people coming to the site. No idea what today will bring.
I'm a sucker for statistics. If you are curoius about the numbers we got, I will post the URL to the stats page in about a week or so. I'll make you come back and work for it a bit. :-)
Updated August 30, 2000 - We got covered in Wired today. There were some mistakes in the article though. I should have called the guy back, but I got busy.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38431,00.html
We NEVER asked CBS for $5 a click. We never got to any talks about price for anything. They launched the discussion with "No! We want total control and we won't pay you anything".
We NEVER offered to sell the domain name. Here's the phone call that I didn't post earlier. I'm beginning to not care about it anymore.
I called up CBS and left a message telling them our URL and asking if they'd like to put a banner ad on the page. I never said a price. Mike told me the first thing after we found out about the TV show was that he didn't want me to sell the name.
Peter Glusker, senior VP of CBS Internet, called back and before I had a chance to say anything, he said "We will not advertise unless we control 100% of the editorial content". I said I didn't know how that was possible, but maybe we could talk.
Then he said "And we don't want to buy the name".
"That's good. We don't want to sell it. We only want you to advertise."
"Well, we're not going to do that."
"Fine then."
"And we don't want to buy the name."
"Fine, I don't want to sell it."
"We might entertain an offer if you put one on the table."
"We don't want to sell it."
"We don't want to buy it anyway. But we would consider an offer...but it wouldn't be anything like $100,000 or anything."
"Fine. We don't want to sell it and if we did, it would be more like $500,000 anyway."
"No way."
"Well, if you don't want to advertise, then we'll just put up a parody site and put out a press release telling everyone that you guys don't want to advertise on our site."
"We can't stop you from that, but you'd better watch out for trademark infringement. We'll be monitoring your site and we have a bunch of lawyers that'll be on you in 8 seconds if you violate anything of ours."
It went on from there... He was astounded that what he called a "piddly little company with a homegrown web site" wouldn't want to give up our 1,000 hits a week. I was offended. (I'm still offended.) "We have the number one show on TV!" Yeah, so why don't you want to advertise on our site again?
I was amazed that this guy, the Senior VP of the Internet group at CBS, didn't get it. This guy was definately a suit with no clue about the net, a complete newbie. He had no idea why the domain name had any value to him. I had the feeling that he expected us to sell it to him for $12. I was offended and intimidated. Stupid people with lots of money can be dangerous.
Fine then, be that way. He was not a very bright person. This was a case of a bad management decision. I pictured him with pointy hair.
This call took place on my birthday.
And now, what you've all been waiting for...this is our stats page:
http://www.walton.com/survivor/theoldreport.html
(My lovely wife and I drove up the coast last weekend. I got to forget about it all for a couple days. It was nice. And now I'm back.)
It's been a long, strange trip. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you in January...
-Conrad Walton
survivor@walton.com