Survcast.com shatters traffic expectations, causes site performance issues

As many of you know Survcast.com launched our feature limited alpha test site and used Twitter as our primary promotional channel beginning March 2011.

Survcast.com quickly ramped to millions of page-views from over 130 countries.  This traffic shattered our estimated traffic load during alpha, and caused slow page loads as well as numerous site outages.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our users and  are doing what we can to address this matter.  We are also amazed by the global interest in our service.

The image above shows Survcast.com  traffic averages from  May through August 2011.  During this period Survcast.com averaged 109 thousand visits and over 858 thousand page-views per month.  Over 700 contributors have joined and continue to create Survs™.  A “Surv” is a user contributed content survey  relating to pre-existing news, blog and/or video content.  Bloggers, journalists, editors, activist, and people from many diverse backgrounds continue to contribute in spite of of our site performance issues.

Clearly people all over the world are interested in leveraging the first online service designed to give them control of the news analysis process.  Our alpha test proves that people will take the time to create and take news surveys.  We look forward to seeing you on Survcast.com.

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Try it yourself click the Surv it™ button below to take the Surv for this post:

New workflow features make taking Survs easier!

In this post we will explore recent changes  to Survcast.com and as always provide a Surv™ to enable you to weigh in with your opinions.

New story workflow:

If you are a regular user the first thing you may notice is that our button labeled ‘opinions’ has been removed.  To access the user created content survey a.k.a. Surv™ all you have to do is click the story title, or the ‘surv it’ button. This action takes you to our details page where you can take the Surv™ and review results.  To access the source content locate and click the button that says ‘read-full-story.’  This action takes you to the story on the source website.  The “read-full-story” button can be found on Survcast.com summary pages that display lists of stories and on detail pages, which include the Surv™ for each story.  We include this button on our summary lists so that you can link to the source content at any time without having to access the detail page first.  You can review the location of these buttons in the image associated with this post.

Short link:

Each story details page that includes the user created Surv™ now includes a short link.  This feature converts the details page long URL into a short URL.  This makes it easier to share the Surv™ on social networking sites and to embedded a link to the Surv™ within content such as blog posts.  To locate the link look for the ‘short link’ label click it to expose the link, copy the link next to the label and past it wherever you want.

We made these changes and additions to help our users locate and share Survs™ more often while supporting ways for them to easily access the source content.  The more people learn about the power of community controlled news analysis provided by Survcast.com the sooner our Surv it™ process can help benefit society by measuring and exposing public opinion about popular subjects.

Try it yourself click the Surv it™ button below to take the Surv for this post: