Xenophon Web Developer Launches Viral Blizzard
Xenophon News
With record-setting amounts of snow forecasted to drop in the Washington DC area this weekend, Xenophon’s Senior Web Developer, Andrew Church, decided to capture the city’s mood by launching a one-page website with a single word flashing in bright bold red letters: PANIC!!!
The site went live at 1:30 PM EST on February 4th, and by 4 PM EST, 20,000 visitors had seen the site, thanks mostly to popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. By 4:18 PM EST, the Washington City Paper named the site “The Best D.C. Snow Website Ever” on its City Desk Blog, and shortly thereafter, the site was linked through to The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang Blog.
Recognizing the potential interest from traditional news media, members of Xenophon’s Public Relations team reached out to contacts in The Washington Post newsroom. By 5:30 PM EST, Andrew Church was being interviewed by venerable Post editor and long-time Metro columnist, Marc Fisher. At the time of the interview, site traffic had reached 55,000 visitors. Once Fisher’s article, entitled “A blizzard of hits for tongue-in-cheek D.C. snow Web site,” ran on The Post’s Web site, traffic to SnowpocalypseDC.com had exceeded the 100,000 mark.
“I did it for fun,” said Church, when asked about his motivation for launching the site.
In spite of receiving multiple offers by advertisers and retailers to capitalize on the volume of traffic to his site, profiting from his viral sensation was the last thing on Church’s mind. “It’s a simple site, and that was the appeal of creating it,” Church said. “I think it’s kind of silly to make money off of something like this,” he said.
Forecasts call for anywhere between 16-24 inches of snow, which will begin falling Friday afternoon, Xenophon’s office will remain open on Friday, with productivity on questionably valuable projects like SnopocalypseDC.com continuing throughout the day.
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