Comment on A-List Blog may result in high traffic

Like most other bloggers, I also keep track of the traffic on my blog. I credit Jeremiah, ex-Hitachi web honcho, for suggesting to keep traffic stats using Google Analytics. I noticed in stats for my blog, that almost half of traffic on Oct 24th came from one source, Scobliezer, an A-List blog by Robert Scoble. No, I am not one of those lucky ones that were mentioned by Scoble.

Most of the traffic originated from his blog entry Internet video business challenges. One of the point, he made in his post was about the high distribution cost with delivering high quality video. He mentioned that he is going to collect $10 in advertising to pay $28 in bandwidth cost.

In my opinion, development cost is one time cost for creating one high quality video but bandwidth cost is proportional to number of times that video is downloaded from fully-owned single distribution point. And there is no easy practical way to reduce the delivery cost without deploying a multi-owned multi-point distribution network. So, I wrote this in comment section (#32) of his blog entry.

Robert,

Mark Cuban is right on target. I will take his idea little further.

Why not allow users who download your video to share and transfer it to other users? This way, you will not need to purchase more bandwidth to txfr video to more users.

Figure out a way to manage digital rights so that even though video can be transferred from user to user but it can’t be played without a digital license. And the license is only distributed from your site.

Combine the digital license with new relevant ads that get embedded with video.
Google (someone else info, my ad) + peer-to-peer bulk data transfer (Napster, only legal) = Ad revenue + Infrastructure cost saving.

Anil

And, this is what Scoble wrote in his comment (#34) as a response to point I raised:

Anil: using BitTorrent or other P2P distribution schemes (RedSwoosh) is very interesting to me. I’m definitely looking into those.

Time to time, though not often, I do write comments on other blogs including A-list blogs typically resulting in little or no impact on traffic to my blog.

So, what was different this time that resulted in higher traffic?

I can only guess two possibilities that caused people to click on my name and check out who I am, the idea mentioned in my comment or validation by Scoble to consider it as an interesting alternative.

Now it raises another question. When making comments on blogs, what is more important - quality, quantity, or frequency? I prefer quality over the other two.

And, hopefully this post will give a pause to someone to rethink his strategy of making irrelevant comments on blogs to promote his storage job blog.


A toilet/restroom in Hokkaido constructed using marble. It also comes with a Yamaha piano, playing on its own, to entertain you while you go about your *smelly* business!