What traffic from 60 Minutes looks like: http://bjk5.com/post/30813320623/what-traffic-from-60-minute...

Its not the traffic that they send, its the quality. TV, printed, and radio traffic are still very good. I once had a magazine mention and only had about 50-ish extra visitors. But, that turned into doubling my sales for the next 2 months. Its not the traffic, but the conversions and sales.

In 2008, a Consumer Reports Money Advisor TV segment that featured http://www.PriceAdvance.com was syndicated to news programs in 15 states right around the holidays. That led to 125k+ installs of our toolbar.

In October 2007, the Wall Street Journal mentioned Startup Schwag on the front page, below the fold. That yielded ~15 signups for the ~$20/mo service, though admittedly its appeal was a bit niche.

One of my side projects[1] was shown for about 20 seconds on BBC News. Overall it drove maybe 10k visitors.

The traffic comes in huge waves. It jumps 500x in seconds and dies down almost as quickly. In my case there were aftershocks as the news piece was aired around the world.

[1] http://asterank.com

The closest my company has come to mainstream fame was in the Wall Street Journal. It was a half page article on page 2 - not about us but more the data from our system (a specialist kind of weather data for energy-data analysis).

I don't think it drove more than about 100 extra visitors - truly a drop in the ocean. As a kind of direct marketing I think it was pretty much useless as the readership is so broad whilst our business is so specialist (no use in exposure unless it's to the right audience).

But we can now mention the WSJ piece as a kind of credibility signal. And for that it is great.

Magazines are definitely surprising in their longevity. I still get people signing up for my service from a small mention in a magazine in 2009.

Some of my wife's projects have been featured on Cable TV shows and in large national magazines (Food and Wine, Brides magazine, Martha Stewart).

The amount of traffic she got from these was minuscule in comparison to popular online sources (Design Sponge).

The magazines in particular do tend to get put online and feed a small amount of views over time.

My company has been mentioned multiple times on major TV and Radio, the most recent being a couple of appearances on two different BBC shows, with millions of people watching. The clicks through to our site were only a handful - in the hundreds, or less.

press for us (and we've gotten quite a bit) has mostly been useful in getting over the 'never heard of you' hurdle which i think is absolutely huge for just about any business conversation. the power of name recognition is astounding. we're a small app - we count our users in thousands units not millions - but our userbase is highly engaged, using our app every time they go to work and our most valuable user segment (bar staff) generally doesn't care about the press and certainly not tech press. mainstream press is mostly a fleeting adrenaline rush and ego stroke for us, it's primary value is street cred.

My blog has been mentioned once (in 2004) on a german national news show (RTL Aktuell).

I got ~500 uniques more that day. I guess in 2004 german TV audience wasn't too much into internet ;)

We often deploy promo sites to handle TV traffic.

For top cable shows (top 5 in weekly cable ratings), a rule of thumb we've found works for planning is 100 thousand uniques per second of time the domain or URL is shown or spoken, during and following the ad. If the brand is the domain, that counts too.

So 15 seconds of clear call to action exposure can drive 1.5 million uniques. Numbers are lower without a call to action.

Relatively little. Yes, there are visible spikes if a site is mentioned on TV, but it's nothing compared to what a decent size mailing can do, or getting attention from a major website.

Even when I used to work for a major TV station and we did very strong promotion in and around well viewed prime time shows the spikes in traffic were nothing shocking.

Of course this says nothing about the long term effects.

I don't think people appreciate how big the biggest magazine subscriptions are (3-7 million) and that people do tend to actually read them.

This is really interesting, but you have to remember to THINK ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

In this case it worked relatively well, because (probably) there is a segment of the public of the site that is more on TV than on internet, so they saw the mention on TV and then went to the PC

I doubt you can get this kind of result from a TV mention (or ad) of HN ;)

if I remember this podcast http://techzinglive.com/page/1285/225-tz-interview-gabriel-w... correctly (duck duck go founder), an nbc morning mention gained him something close to zero users.

I bet the easy-to-remember and apt name helped combat the product's "lack of SEO friendly links". Conversion from someone hearing of a product once in offline media, even if they're a perfect demographic fit, seems impressive.

HN will send more traffic than your mentions in magazines.

really, the lack of a link (AKA THE FACT THAT IT HAPPENED OFFLINE) limited the long term seo value of the mention... Count me among the shocked.