How Did I Get 150,000 Views on Flickr in One Day?

In mid-January 2009, a nerdishly awesome thing happened: one of my flickr photos got 150,000 views over the course of a day. How did that happen? It got onto the front page of Digg.

At this point, there’s no secret that Digg is a huge site that generates a tremendous amount of traffic for any link that gets a lot of votes (“diggs”). That said, getting ANY link promoted to the front page of Digg, much less one of your own, is a challenging and commendable feat in itself, and from what I’ve learned is something that rarely if ever happens accidentally.

Back in autumn 2005, while working at Wired magazine, I designed a DIY paper case for the then brand new and unbelievably tiny iPod nano, and posted it on my site Sneakmove.com. A couple days later, the traffic on the page began to skyrocket. Someone had posted the link to Digg, a newish “user submitted content” site that was becoming hugely popular very quickly.

On January 11 (2009), I was taking photos of the full moon out the back patio of my apartment in San Francisco. It was the closest the moon had been to the earth since 1993. Low in the sky, the moon was huge, but even with a 200mm lens I couldn’t make out all the details without zooming in after snapping each photo. I noticed what appeared to be tiny aircraft far off in the distance, following a similar path. I realized one might even pass in front of the moon. I watched for about 30 minutes until seeing a trajectory that looked just about right. I propped my camera up and snapped a single shot of the blinking light as it passed across the moon’s face. Zooming in on the LCD screen, I was amused to see that the aircraft was a tiny Cessna, silhoutted against the bright moon. It looked awesome. I immediately posted it on Flickr, and just for kicks, on Digg. The community quickly started posting compliments.

By the next day, the photo was already closing in on 100k views. During the night, it had made it to the front page of Digg. As the day went on, the Diggs accumulated and the photo made it to the “Top in all sections” sidebar, keeping it on the front page and keeping the diggs and views coming in. It finally moved off the front page about 24 hours, 2800 diggs, 150,000 views, and hundreds of comments and favorites later.