A star for a day. What I learned
Today, Clever Dude went from near-obscurity into stardom with a single post. I got a taste of fame and it was bittersweet.
What happened today?
Whereas CleverDude.com normally gets about 80-100 visitors per day, thanks to a post by my wife Clever Dudette, my site has gotten over 10,600 visitors and still counting (it’s 10:00pm Eastern). The site was featured on the front page of Consumerist, Lifehacker, LifeHack, Delicious (Popular pages), and numerous other personal and commercial sites.
How did I feel at the beginning?
I was elated. I was paging my wife that her article was getting a couple hundred visitors at about 10am, which is more than I’ve ever gotten in a day. Then it kept building, and I was getting more comments than I’ve ever gotten. More comments in a single post than almost on my whole site! I could barely concentrate at my day job, and my coworkers were following the numbers up and up and up.
When did things go wrong?
I learned a few things today about etiquette and copyright law. Some early visitors may have noticed 3 pictures next to the menu items in the Frugal Lunch post. Right now, there’s only 1 (the Tuna Salad Sandwich). These images were pulled from Flickr.com late last night, and I didn’t understand the whole Creative Commons thing. I seriously thought they were SHARING their images. Why else would they post them on a community site like Flickr?
My site got picked up from Lifehack.org, then by LifeHacker.com, then by The Consumerist.com, via LifeHacker. The Consumerist used the tuna salad sandwich image from my post for their own, and that’s where things went downhill. Since the Consumerist has had problems with using images on Flickr in the past without attributing them to the owner, the Flickr community immediately picked up on it and formed a mob.
Settling the issues
By about 3pm, the owner of the tuna salad sandwich photo got wind of the problem and emailed me. Rachel Rappaport was very nice about the whole thing, which I can’t say about the Flickr community (I read the Forum post thanks to another Flickr Pro member). I worked things out very quickly with Rachel and attributed the picture to her properly. I then removed the other 2 pictures as I found they were “All Rights Reserved” and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of any more fallout.
What did I learn about Creative Commons copyrights and Flickr usage?
If you’re going to use an image from Flickr (or any other site), you need to find out what the owner’s copyright on the image allows for. This page on Flickr lets you find images that fall under different ranges of Creative Commons, as well as explain each type of CC level.
For example, the lowest license level, Attribution License lets you do almost anything with the image as long as you attribute the image to the owner. All Rights Reserved is the strictest and you might as well go find another image.
What is Attribution?
Attribution may differ for each owner, and it’s best to find out what the owner wants by contacting them directly before using their image. Some owners are fine with just their name listed. Some want the image to link back to their Flickr page, or another homepage. Others may ask for both, or even more. It’s up to them, which can cause a lot of confusion and disgust with the system. However, you don’t want people stealing your articles without notifying you, right?
What did I learn about web site design?
I learned that I need to clean out even more from my theme. Turns out there’s still a bit of baggage hanging around and dragging server performance down. It could be the K2 code all over the place (likely), too many plugins (likely), or too many images or other links (likely). I’ll be working on the site design behind the scenes for the next few nights to streamline the design, but I’ll try to minimize the impact to you, my visitors.
Tell me some more stats!
I don’t have the new Feedburner stats (except I got 5 new email subscribers), and Alexa hasn’t updated yet, but I did go from about 103,000 on Technorati to about 65,000 today. Also, I went from #51 Finance site on TopBlogSites.com to #2. I don’t think I’ll kick #1 by tomorrow though.
Thanks for making the site such a success today!
Mike,
First off, congratulations on the success of your wife’s post. I think you owe her a nice dinner! 😉
You can count me as one of your new subscribers. I have been picking through your site and absolutely love the content – you cover many topics that are near and dear to me.
This was a great post, though I have burning question: Where is your website hosted, and did you experience any problems (other than the usual slow down) from the spike in traffic?
Thanks again for the great content – Keep it up!
Aaron
The site is hosted with Dreamhost, and yes I had problems serving up the content yesterday. However, I’ve found from fellow bloggers that are on dreamhost that the server should have handled the load.
I think my specific theme has too many javascript calls and other unneeded items, so I’ll be stripping out the waste. It’s a K2 theme, and is enabled with alot of functionality, but I really don’t use it or plan to use it.
Good to know – first thing I thought when I saw your post was man I got to start including cool pictures like that. That’s why my blog never gets any big traffic 😉 It’s tough finding good pictures out there where you don’t have to worry about licensing issues.
Congrats on your success with the blog. I have added you to my Feed Reader and am looking forward to reading more from both of you!
I am sorry you had so many problems with Flickr. I have used Flickr images for awhile, but if you click on them they go right over to the Flickr page of the artist. I thought if it said, “Blog This” that meant that you were free to use it for your blog.
Here is where I think it gets shady. I have been blogging for a couple of years now and the Flickr images still go to the photographer’s pages. The only way that I can make that work (because I am not technical in the slightest) is if they offer the, “Blog This” option. Unfortunately a couple of months ago I had a photographer contact me because her work was copyrighted and I had used it a year ago on my blog. She asked nicely that the image be pulled. I pulled the image immediately and emailed her back and apologized for the confusion. I explained that the work had been accessible before and that I would never take someone’s images without that being an option to use them. She said that she had been having some issues with Flickr and that she had always had copyrighted the images, but it hadn’t been showing that in Flickr.
I hope it helps to know that you are not alone. I just need that fifteen minutes of fame to get the mob after me 🙂
Thanks for sharing the flickr page CD. And also for sharing transparently so others can learn.
Cheers,
OptionPundit
I’m not aware of all the detail in your case, but to be honest, as far as flickr goes, most of the time copyright owners are just as guilty as those who use their material. For example, their photo licence is CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. But the blogging option in flickr is not active! Or the other way around, photo is copyrighted but it is available to bloggers! I guess most photo owners don’t actually bother to read what licensing is all about. They just pick one when they first set their flickr detail and that’s it.
Hi there!
Your story it pretty interesting. Thanks for the warning BTW. I never thought a simple picture would cause to much trouble.
Regards,
René
ProBloggerWorld.de
Thanks for the info on Flickr photo use. I don’t use many graphics or images on my own site, but it is good to know about the potential problems if I’m not careful.
This was great, Clever Dude, but for all the wrong reasons.
I experienced a similar thing (though nowhere near the heights you achieved). I’m writing and writing, and getting no movement. Then I (finally) got my wife to write an article and the readership rocketed for the day! Why does that happen?
We men sweat blood, and then the women waltz in, write a screamer, and then want to know what so hard about writing a blog post! Go figure.