Sparkfun Freeday - A Bust

So many people on the net know about Sparkfun. It is a quirky website out of Boulder Colorado that sells electronic kits/gadgets/pcbs/components for building your own whatever. They concentrate on Ardunio type single board computers.

Today was "Freeday" where they gave away $100 to the first 1ooo customers. But before today they made a big deal about how they tuned up their servers to handle the load. Maybe they were a bit optimistic but MANY people who tried to participate (including myself) spent 2 hours hitting "refresh" when all we had to do was click "confirm order."

Now I (and many other people) have a huge level of frustration that because the site wouldn't let us through, we lost out. In other words the "free" offer was not played fairly because their servers slowed to a crawl. I would totally accept having the money go quickly (in something like 5 minutes) and I just missed out. But clicking refresh for 2 hours (literally) makes it unacceptable. Who are they anyway to waste 2 hours of my (and MANY other peoples) time?

So for "Freeday" Sparkfun got almost unlimited FREE advertising. Much more than $100,000 could have bought in traditional channels. They are #1 for google Search and twitter is "all a twitter" about Sparkfun.

But people all over the world got up early, or zoned out of work to click refresh for 2 hours. What was the real cost of Freeday in lost time and frustration? A quick estimate of 2 hours of $7.50 an hour for 100,000 people (probably many more) is 1.5 million. But I wonder what the statistics will show about how many people really tried to get in on Freeday. It may be better for Sparkfun if they don't publish the results.

Update: the site had 70,000 unique visitors that day. 70,000 * $15 = $1,050,000.

(Notice that they are no links in this message. Sparkfun got enough of my free advertising already)

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