Bubblegumkitten

Who needs a whole website when you can just have one word?

Yep – just a single word – No design, No images, No, well… point… to be honest – but these one word viral sites really speak to us. They amuse on such a basic level that they often immediately go viral and seem to draw traffic stats which laugh at all our SEO optimised masterpieces by suceeding without any obvious effort at all to do so.

These are the Single Serving Sites, a term writer Jason Kottke termed in February, whimsical one page single purpose site,  usually doing exactly what their domain name implies, or sometimes nothing at all. But they are amusing as a concept – I should know – I’ve visited them.

The examples that spring to mind are http://www.isitchristmas.net/ and http://www.isitaprilfools.com/ – which say Yes or No based on the date (although I suspect that the April fools one will say No even on the correct date as it seems to have no JavaScript behind it) and the newest one I have spotted is http://isgordonbrownstillprimeminister.com/ – which says Yes… The entire site is about 3 lines of code and a google analytics link.

http://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites contains a list of over a hundred such sites compiled by Ryan Greenberg who also wrote a rather good paper on the phemonenon which he has hosted on http://isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com/.

But these sort of sites aren’t a new idea – they have been around for some time now – with http://www.purple.com/ displaying a purple screen since 1994.

So why are these sites so sucessful?

They are funny, simple and appeal to our base sense of humour at the absurd – we know what the site will say – we look just to be amused at the fact that somebody has made it. The fact the site has no agenda or hidden motive, it exists just to amuse us and it’s creator allows it to go viral and spread because we feel it is our joke to share. I suspect if there were even one google adword or banner ad on these sites they would not spread in the same way. These are sites made by regular people with a sense of humour for likeminded people – and that is all. The perfect example for me is http://www.yetanotheruselesswebsite.com/ - there is no content on the site except in the source code where it states: “Well I’ll be, you’re looking at the source code! In case you hadn’t figured it out, there is absolutely no point to this web site.” – an in joke between web developers and other internet professionals as they are the only people likely to wonder what is behind the site and look at the code to see the comment… for anyone else – the site just wouldnt be funny. And this is another reason these sites work so well – they are small jokes at specific targeted audiences which are then virally shared between people who match that criteria – they effectly let us do their marketing just by existing and allowing us to share them with each other. Like a funny bit of graffiti on a wall we point them out to our friends and share them with mroe enthusiasm than any far more useful sites that exist on the web, simply because they make us laugh.

Ryan also noted that the sites: “provide a venue for pop culture references, inside jokes, art displays, collective action, bids for peer approval, humor, and advice. Collectively they offer a perspective on the web as a platform for a unique brand of storytelling.” . Something which I think is key to their sucess. He also notes that these sites fall into different catagories. Some sites answer a question, some show a status or single piece of information whereas others have a single function. What they tend to all have in common is that they are literal visual representations of their URL domain name such as SometimesRedSometimesBlue.com or Thispeanutlookslikeaduck.comwhich contains content which does exactly that.

So is there anything to be learnt from these sites? I would say that they remind us that for all the clever content and SEO in the world we should never forget what the most important thing we can do to gain web traffic is: If you want traffic, give the visitor what they want.