Traffic, engagement, and social media metrics from Academic Earth's January soft launch.

1. Metrics from Soft Launch
January 18 - February 28

2. Company Intro
• Academic Earth is a platform
for premium educational
online videos
• Recently-completed beta
site features videos of full
courses and guest lectures
from Yale, Harvard, MIT,
Princeton, Stanford, and
Berkeley

3. Description of Soft Launch
Activities
• Opened public beta on January 18
• Emailed ~500 friends with link
• Publicized site to authors of 23 education blogs
• Spent $512 on Google AdWords
• No press release or outreach to large blogs or
mainstream media

4. Traffic
218,552 409,050
Unique Visitors in February Total Visits in First Six Weeks
500,000
375,000
250,000
125,000
0
Jan 18-24 Jan 25-31 Feb 1-7 Feb 8-14 Feb 15-21 Feb 22-28
Weekly Visits Cumulative

5. Traffic Sources
First-Time Visitors
Promotion & Paid Search
Paid search traffic
Solicited blog coverage
7% Unpaid Search
Direct Traffic
8%
31%
Unsolicited Coverage
Media
Blogs
33% Forums
Directories
21%
Social Media &
Email
Viral growth, unsolicited PR, and organic search drove 13
visitors for every 1 visitor obtained through promotion.

6. Engagement
Average stay per visit, excluding visits
less than 10 seconds
Average stay per visit, all visits
16:51 27:04

7. Social Media and Links
All figures as of March 1, 2009
1,452
Fans on Facebook
5,001
777 Tags on Delicious
Blogs linking to
academicearth.org,
according to Technorati
1,000+ 17,727
Tweets on twitter
Total incoming links,
referencing
according to Yahoo
academicearth.org

8. “Academic Earth is unexpectedly irresistible.
It's like Hulu, but for nerds.”
- Slate.com
Official Launch Coming Late March
Drop us a line at hello@academicearth.org