Sponsor's Message

While many idiots opt to spam, smarter folks focus on more ethical methods of driving traffic to their pages.

And then you have NASA -- who have discovered that all you need to do in order to turn your website into one of the hottest properties on the Net is to successfully land a craft on Mars and publish the pictures it sends back on the web.

Yes, it seems that NASA's website has scored over 1.25 billion hits in the past week or so -- and that's one hell of a lot of traffic. A bit of mental arithmetic performed by my feeble neurons and synapses suggest that this is over a thousand hits a second -- or one request every millisecond!

Of course we all know that "hits" is a useless measure of web traffic, a number that can be highly skewed by the basic design and composition of a webpage.

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However, if you look at the average NASA webpage you'll see that it's not overly-littered with small page elements and that those 1.25 billion hits probably amount to something like 80-100 million page-views.

Now, if the average viewer looks at (say) 5 pages per visit, that's still 20 million user-sessions -- still a pretty impressive figure!

If you bear in mind that this is just the traffic so far and that the mission is set to last for almost another three months, you can see that the total traffic generated by this website will be immense.

Simple extrapolation would suggest that during these three months, the total number of user-sessions will probably exceed 300 million -- and that's an amazing figure for several reasons...

Firstly, it's going to cost an enormous amount of money to run that website, even at US traffic and hosting rates.

But secondly, and perhaps most astoundingly, it would appear that sending a spacecraft to Mars turns out to be a pretty cost-effective method of promoting your website.

Yes, the budget for the two current Mars Rover missions is US$600 million, and is divided pretty much 50/50 between the two craft. This means, if my simple number-crunching is to be believed, that NASA will have paid around $1 per user session over the life of the project.

Most realistic advertising campaigns on the Net budget a figure of at least $1 per qualified visitor -- which is exactly what NASA will be paying.

The crazy thing is that, if the US Government were just a little more entrepreneurial, they could have almost paid for the entire mission by placing a couple of advertising banners on each page of the NASA website!

And perhaps this simple analysis will help catalyze the private exploration of space.. after all, if you can put up a decent website and round up enough advertisers it might even become a profitable little business.

So forget old-fashioned tactics such as banners and spam -- missions to mars are now the most effective form of website advertising!

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