I thought I would attempt an experiment on the art social network site deviantART.
On one of my higher traffic pages I embedded a nearly invisible iframe. Inside this 1 pixel square is someone’s profile page. So whenever someone visits my site, this deviantART members page loads as well. This page gets anywhere from 30-40k page loads a day. Considering the results I have already seen, I have already ended the test.
I picked someone with a lot of friends, and artwork that is mediocre at best. She is a huge fan of Paul McCartney so 90% of her art is random collages of him with some text that confesses her dying love for him. If anything her profile is more of a fan page than an artist’s page. Even her most popular work wouldn’t be considered for a fan page gallery, its more fodder for conversing with friends.
Which makes her an excellent guinea pig for my experiment. She isn’t looking for real critique, she isn’t looking for fame, she’s just around for the friends. The one thing that did stand out though was that she submitted a screencap of her hitting 13,000 page views. Today she broke 16,000! To place that in perspective, she got 104 views yesterday and 114 the day before. As of writing this she has 3,255 for the day.
The reason for this is more for the reaction. Does it help her, or what? What do her friends say? What will her page views be after tomorrow now that I have stopped? Am I a cruel bastard? I possibly already know the answer to the last question, but you’re welcome to humor me anyway.
I am not posting any information about her screencaps or anything for a while just so that she doesn’t get let in on the secret. I think that maybe in a week things will settle back down and I will do one of two things…. let her in on the secret or install the iframe again. In case you missed the title of the post, it will probably be the latter.
I don’t think I am being too cruel, but then again I don’t know this girl either. Don’t know her age, what she looks like, or anything for that matter. I only gathered she is a girl from claiming to be Mrs. Paul McCartney.








