05
2010
Beautiful People experiences fifty-fold increase in traffic following “fatties” announcement
The dating and social networking website Beautifulpeople.com which describes itself as “an exclusively beautiful community”, stirred up a bit of controversy yesterday when it announced the axing some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight. “As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said site founder Robert Hintze, “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”
Going by the principle all publicity is good publicity; this was a clever bit of “controversial” PR straight out of the Millwall FC / Ryanair “no one likes us, we don’t care” book. And it worked: as the chart below illustrates, UK Internet visits to the site increase fifty-fold yesterday. As a result, Beautiful People became the fifth most visited website in our Lifestyle – Dating category, up from 136th the day before.
But how did the hoi polloi get onto the site, given its exclusive nature? Presumably most of them clicked on this useful button, helpfully displayed at the bottom of the Beautiful People homepage.
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Although if you do go to the site, to sneak a look at the beautiful people, you now get this error message
“The huge media coverage is currently generating so much traffic on our servers that we have had to limit some users from using the site. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”
Foot – shoot – OUCH!!
Marcus – it seems to work OK from the Hitwise office. We’re probably on their white list
This is also a part of the “exclusivity” psychological phenonemon. Everyone wants to part of the “in” crowd
This is an excerpt from social psychologist Ciadlini’s web site:
Influence By Scarcity
“If I can’t have it, I want it.” Cialdini gave the consumer market fervor over iPhone as an example. “The idea of losing something mobilizes people into action.”
And, when combined with exclusivity, scarcity became even more effective. “People are more convinced and receptive to exclusive information.” A product that is scarce and marketed with information that is exclusive is highly persuasive. Cialdini cautioned that information must be shared quickly or it can lose its potency. “It’s like bread not wine. It doesn’t get better with time. You need to serve it up while it’s fresh and warm.”
Cialdini made a slight modification to a Bose Wave ad that resulted in a 45 percent sales increase versus previously stagnant product sales. Whereas the high end stereo manufacturer was using words like “new” to launch its product, Cialdini instead employed the words “Hear what you’ve been missing.”