It was the first blog Donald M. had ever written. The idea was no different then millions of bloggers across the world. Write down some interesting thoughts and get a little bit of traffic hopefully having people post comments from time to time. Like everyone out there he wanted more and more people stopping and maybe even making a little money. He did a little research and posted some advertising, tried to add new posts often, joined a few groups and often visited other blogs leaving comments while signing them with his blog address. In no time he had people visiting his blog and leaving comments. His traffic volume wasn't high, but it was a start. What happened next was out of his control and changed his life forever.
At the Reddit headquarters a new programmer was assigned a task. Write an algorithm that will randomly go through thousands of Reddit accounts and drop a new blog into their "likes" area on every Reddit profile that the algorithm finds. The Blog that is being dropped in was supposed to be the Blog of the Reddit VP of Customer Affairs. This Blog would also come up at the top of every search that Reddit users would perform. A very simple mistake in the code wold give one Blogger more traffic than any Blog in history.
A representative from Reddit headquarters said the mistake in the algorithm was that instead of going through blogs and posting the way it was supposed to, the algorithm took the first blog that it found (http://braintwinkey.blogspot.com)and posted that blog in the same way. So thousands of Reddit bloggers across the world all found this new blog in their "likes" area along with this blog appearing first on whatever Reddit search anyone performed. In the first two hours after this occurred the blog had over 15,000 hits, 4,745 posts, 11,437 points and 5,027 clicks on the posted ads.
A Reddit employee doing standard searches of the most popular blogs discovered the blog due to the fact that in one week there were 176,417 points and over 674,000 hits.
When Donald realized he was getting so many visitors he began writing and writing, responding to as many people as he could as he was an instant celebrity. People loved his stuff! By the time the algorithm had been repaired Donald's Blog had over 16,000 followers and he had made almost $470,000 from his ads.
He quit his normal job and now works at home for Reddit writing on his blog and responding to the posts!
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