MBA students! Webmasters! Children with nothing better to do! Let’s do some learning. At the beginning of December, Apple’s lawyer’s wrote to Love Labs to complain that an animation on the iBuzz.co.uk Web site had infringed its copyright. Apple’s aim was to have the animation purged from the Web before anybody else could see it. Did their letter have the desired effect?
A quick look at Alexa reveals what Apple’s threatened copyright infringement lawsuit did to the number of visitors to www.ibuzz.co.uk last December. The site was (un)happily bumbling along averaging a reach of about 4 visitors per million for the best part of a year. Belatedly, Apple got the hump over a Flash animation on the site and sent the lawyers in – with hilarious consequences…
Of course, Alexa doesn’t provide cold hard facts, but the Apple Effect (TM – ME!) is pretty plain to see.
The number of visitors before the threatening letter gave iBuzz.co.uk an Alexa rank somewhere in the 500,000s, with about 4 people in every million online visiting the site each day. Let’s for the sake of argument, call it next to nothing.
Shortly after Apple’s letter, the number of people coming to the site to see what all the fuss was about caused iBuzz.co.uk to briefly leap into the top 40,000 sites in the world, with a reach for a couple of days of nearly 120 per million people online. Which, for the sake of argument, is a whole lot more and is quite possibly the opposite of what Apple hoped to achieve.
You can draw your own conclusions about what it means to you.
Webmasters and marketing types might start thinking about who they could goad into threatening them with legal action – some say that Apple did that with iPhone – but that is clearly a high-risk strategy.
Legal types might start thinking about what they want to achieve before firing off their expansively monickered letters. Sometimes it’s better just to get the client to ask nicely.
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Marketers have been doing this for a long time – the phrase ‘as long as you spell my name right’ springs to mind! Getting on the wrong side of a large company can indeed cause traffic spikes and much more but beware when doing so as link bait or to attract buzz as this can have consequences. Saying that, even companies that go as far as legal action often come off worse.