A year or so ago Nick and I started a blog cataloging sightings of the infamous Papyrus font, aptly named Papyrus Watch. (You’ve probably seen the font, check our handy field guide for reference). “It’s Halifax’s favourite font”, we thought. Little did we know the problem was widespread. We’ve caught it used by several major brands, including most recently, Avatar. Hey, type matters. Seth Godin just wrote about it, plus XKCD is on board:
The year turned out well with about 30,000 unique visitors and almost 60,000 total pageviews with an average time on site of over a minute. Traffic is a split between linking sites, social media, search engines, and subscribers/returning visitors. It’s been fun to maintain and grow, and of course for us analyze all the stats. We used Facebook and Twitter to build support and keep in touch. Here’s what some people are saying:
“Thank you for your great service to the world.”
“I fully support your cause!”
“You have no idea how much joy it gives me to learn that @papyruswatch exists. :)”
“That is one of the most pointless websites I have ever been to” (Yay niches! Can’t please ‘em all ;)
Ok guys, what’s the point of this post? Well, we’ve learned some things. Although this was for fun, we had a plan to try and find the right people and get submissions and use some of the great (and free) things online to make it better. Like Twitter, the Fickr Map, and bit.ly + TwitterFeed. It takes time. Getting 20 visits a day seemed magical, and it was months before we received a single user submission. Now we have sightings from all over. You get more when you give more. We couldn’t be on top of everything all the time, but replying to emails and people on Twitter and asking questions always got responses. Facebook also sent a surprising amount of people. And finally, if you make something good that people like, they’ll spread the word for you.
