I recently worked on a fun project with Six to Start to promote the new single from popular radio and gramophone recording artistes Muse. The website, Ununited Eurasia was a week-long treasure hunt requiring fans to solve puzzles and find USB keys in seven cities around the world.
Six to Start have many more facts and figures about the project, which went from “from greenlight to live in one week”, including:
- Nearly 50,000 registered users in a one-week period
- Over 560,000 unique visits over two weeks
- Over 200,000 unique visitors over two weeks
- Over 2.7m pageviews over two weeks
- An average of 6 minutes spent on site per session
- Visitors from over 160 countries
- Over 50,000 downloads of an exclusive MP3, United States of Eurasia
- Ununited States of Eurasia made trending topics on Twitter three times over the course of the week
- With Amazon Web Services, over 2 terabytes of data shifted in one week
Phew. I tried to keep up with the fans posting on the forums, as they worked out what was happening while the hunt progressed, but I couldn’t manage it: over 27,000 messages were posted. I loved following fans on Twitter on the other side of the world, as they jostled to collect a USB key from a stranger, then seeing photos of the event appearing online. It was a lot of fun to watch.
I was responsible for building the backend of the site and it was a busy week. I used the CodeIgniter PHP framework for the first time and it was a delight to use. Most things Just Worked and, with some speedy typing, we were able to get everything working in time for launch.
Commenting is disabled on posts once they’re 30 days old.