Fixation Video

Last Friday’s episode of Frackulous - our new daily app show - featured Stephen Fry. Well, not technically Stephen Fry himself, but we did have a number of app suggestions to help him out with his new pub pastime.

We obviously thought it would be brilliant, if a little unlikely, if Stephen Fry linked to this episode on his Twitter account - since he’s got 1.7m followers and all. At 1:30pm that actually happened.

Somewhat predictably, the server fell over under the weight of traffic. We had prepared for the slight chance of a sudden influx of traffic and nailed everything down, but it still wasn’t enough. But it came back in about five minutes and stayed up from that point onwards.

Our bit.ly Pro stats (bit.ly powers our frkl.us URL shortener) show that to date 17,216 people have clicked the link Stephen Fry posted. Our Google Analytics account shows we dropped a couple of thousand visitors while the site was down, but the majority of them made it to the site.

On YouTube, however, it looks like only 703 people have viewed the video which is clearly significantly less. The video on Frackulous was set to autoplay, so anyone who arrived at the page would have at least started watching the video. YouTube now appears to lock videos around the 300 views point and it’s not clear when they then get updated again. There obviously needs to be measures in place to stop people artificially increasing their view count and gaming the system, but when a traffic spike is genuine the current system seems to disadvantage news shows.

The main benefit is that thousands of people saw Frackulous - which is really why we make it. It’s just a shame it’s not currently reflected in all the publicly available stats. We’ll update the post again once we hear back from YouTube about what the situation is.