Good promotion, crappy site. All he is doing is scraping eBay auctions, which makes his results crap, since all of the results are in the process of bidding or haven't met reserve yet.

lol you may need to look a little closer.

the ebay auctions he links to set an affiliate cookie on the user's browser. they are getting paid $xx per new ebay user signup and/or a % of whatever purchases that user generates in ebay (they don't even have to buy a car... anything else in their ebay shopping cart that is bought will contribute revenue to the owners of the site)

you may think it's crappy but with 500k unique visitors, there's a decent amount of loot that was made

I meant crappy for the end user, why go to this site, if you can go to eBay directly. Or better yet go to Craigslist which has a ton more <$1K vehicles than eBay.

And yeah they may have 500K uniques due to this promotion...but how many of them will come back?

not every website on the internets is created to shake things up and change the world...

this website serves a single purpose: get people to click onto the ebay auction and get an ebay affiliate cookie placed on their computer.

it succeeds.

Sorry, but I agree with vaskel.

The PR campaign may have been a success, but the site/business as a whole does not seem destined for success–if in fact it's goal is to be a going concern.

They may have generated some affiliate revenue, but now what? Are they going to keep doing cross-country road trips? I'd imagine that very few visitors will refer this site to a friend/family member for the exact reason vaskel stated.

There is at least one piece of solid gold in this article:

"Ask to speak to the assignment editor when calling TV stations."

That alone will save you days and days of cold-calling failure.

Even if it is just a eBay scraping service, I thought this quote was good: "So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process."

"Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors"

That's the key. You can do everything, but there is still an element of 'cold-calling' that's necessary, and sucking up any fear or rejection.

Nice example of generating word of mouth buzz (viral message + good trigger), makes a lot of sense if distribution is a major issue for your product - ie. your market (and competitors) are more active offline...

Not sure if they can keep it up, though.

Neat idea, but how much did it cost him to drive across the country, especially assuming that he normally stayed in a hotel room?

When I travel by driving and stay in hotels it usually costs > $200/day between gas, food, and lodging, so assuming he bought the car for this I'd guess they spent a few thousand dollars for those 500K hits.

A cool idea to be sure (and good job on the local news thing, the spreadsheet/assignment editor is a good one to remember), but was this really all that cost effective?

how else would you buy 500K hits for a few thousand dollars?

Funny, I didn't hear of it until I was on HN :)

Tee Hee, it's Fox 69. Actually, I didn't even know that stations like this made it out of the single digits.

Fox got its start as a UHF station.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHF#Television