Trickle Up -

This is more of a notion. With some time, I hope to form it into a concept, then maybe get some money to turn it into an idea.

I wanted to put down in text this idea of trickle up viewership. Jen Stark's Paper Art has now reached 76,000 views, thanks largely to BoingBoing.net, a site that clearly gets mad traffic. The most interesting thing about Jen's viewership graph is that each spike is larger than the one that came before it. The first spike came from Jen's own website, which added a healthy 1500 views in a weekend. Then came www.cpluv.com, a design site that doubled the spike with more than 3K views. CPLUV brought it to the attention of the Wooster Collective, which embraced the video and it shot up 5K in a single day. Add to that the traffic still flowing from CPLUV and it took a while for that to die down. Then came 2modern.blog.com with a healthy 4K spike, roughly equivalent to what came before. Then all was quiet until last week BoingBoing.net placed the video front and center and we had 11k views in a matter of hours. What strikes me most is that the circulation of the video increases as time goes by - it starts in a local market and then gains momentum and attention, passing through to larger and larger audiences. It's being handed up the ladder - gaining tens of thousands of views along the way. This is a pattern worth studying.

It's also worth noting that in a typical TV broadcast, this segment may have only reached 15,000 people at once. Online, Jen's reach is far greater than on our regional TV. Granted its an evergreen video, but balance that observation with this: those who saw it on TV did so without knowing what was coming up. Those who saw it online knew before hand and were genuinely curious.