Over the weekend, readers hoping to catch some cow slinging from our hay eating friend were rudely redirected to to this blog. The redirect lasted a whole day and created a lot of buzz and speculation. The most logical explanation was I acquired the blog so the person suing the cow would think twice about suing someone who has the means to defend himself.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be a piece of linkbait. There was no lawsuit and the forwarding of the domain was to help add to the drama. Another reason for the domain forwarding was we wanted to see the effect on a blog after it’s been gone for 24 hours. What happens to the traffic when the site comes back? What about the RSS readership?
The Cow Comes Home With a Bang
When the cow came back on Sunday, its RSS was down by 25% and some people were questioning whether the linkbait was worth it. However, the blog has recovered nicely and has fully regained all its traffic and RSS subscribers. So it appears that shutting down for 24 hours didn’t have much of an effect on traffic. If anything the extra buzz will help the blog to a new traffic record.
The linkbait did generate one problem however. Text Link Ads rejected the cow because the product manager though the blog was a copyright infringement on my blog. I’m sure that’ll be cleared up real soon.
If your blog goes down, don’t start pulling your hair out and worrying about all your readers going away. If your content is good, they will be back. Unless your blog is mirrored across multiple servers, down time is something that cannot be avoided. However, it’s good to know that a bit of downtime won’t kill you.
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{ 81 comments }
Very evil. Very evil indeed. Evil 2x.
But at least, the cows are back!
told you so
Yay the Cow is back! Just more evil than before
Maybe less evil. What can top this?
Dang Lewis, why did you ask that? Now they will collaborate w/ Da Hustler to REALLY throw the world for a loop!
do you think it was worth it? I cant see it having had that much of an effect
John Cow and Chow should change their names to something like John Evil.
Now that is truely Evil Chow and Cow. Just goes to strengthen our belief that you are one in the same.
Moogel on with your bad selves
he is a true evil
no one does it better
Debo, they’re aren’t one, even though it seems like it. I have some Cow vs. Chow info on my blog in a few days, and it should prove to be very interesting…bwahahaha!
Sorry, seemed like the right moment for a Austin Powers-like evil laugh.
Noticed that you used the word “WE”.
Another reason for the domain forwarding was we wanted to see the effect on a blog after it’s been gone for 24 hours.
Does it mean John Cow and John Chow are essentially one and the same?
If so, that’s certainly
!
The Cow is another blogger, a simple whois query is enough to reveal the author.
Long live The Cow!
Actually, all a whois will show is Domains by Proxy info although it also shows that it uses the bobmeetsworld nameservers.
Exactly. It turns out that BobMeetsWorld is a blog. So the cow is probably Bob.
If he said:
Another reason for the domain forwarding was that I wanted to see the effect on a blog after it’s been gone for 24 hours.
then you would be right, could be the same person. ‘We’ denotes two (2). Personal Development for the Book Smart eh?
This is crazy! Wow, I think the Cow was pretty smart to do this. Now a lot of people know about that blog who hadn’ known about it before. Good Job Mr. Cow.
that’s true
yup…even johnchow is promoting johncow in his blog
yup Will get a lot traffic
It’s completely blog start-up genius. VERY few blogs do the $1K he did in the first month out. Personally, I think it’s awesome.
DevDad
This dude has had to have gone to marketing school or something. He’s just too dag on smart! And the worse part? Only big blogs could imitate him now, no one who is small.
Good work.
Note To Self: next time anything happen to johncow, its LINKBAIT.
possibly
definitely
Most probably.
very possible
Ehh this to be honest is one post I am not impressed with. Just goes to show how one can be very decieving. And just to gain readers. Kinda dishonest don’t you think?
yeah, that was my impression of it. Sort of like the boy that cried wolf…
that’s the beauty of it
if you believed what he said about the copyright stuff, then you could’ve just about believed in anything
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
You could really, really twist the wording, and he could say he meant that he was getting SEWED (spell check, heck is it even a word?), to mean that the website was sown up, as in nothing else could get in, meaning traffic, so it was a wrap, meaning cease and desist actions and activity, and that’s why the redirect was done, to repel people away.
I had an active imagination as a child.
Good Job Senor Cow or should I say Chow
you think Chow also writes bobmeetsworld.com? Call me a skeptic but I dont think so.
now we know
They are NOT the same person
but seem to work well as a team, I was shocked that they did this, but gotta say, it does seem to have worked
So I guess, Good job
If so Chow and Cow both did a great job at linkbaiting and it certainly booste Cows traffic.
wouldn’t it be ironic if john secretly owned cow and is using cow as a second stream of income?
Not ironic, just awesome! Right now, this blog has stayed at about 10K for a few months. It’s easier to gain a few thousand by launching a new blog with a close link to this one than to increase revenue of this one X%.
DevDad
well done indeed
Thats true.
I always had this feeling and I as I wrote in my earlier writings also that John Chow and John Cow were the same person. But off late I feel that I was wrong in thinking this and in fact this parody is the work of a group operating under John Chow. Although this drama is dishonest, but still it helped John Chow and John Cow to build a strong position. It definitely created ripples amongst the regular visitors of both the sites. The tension was worth seeing. Comments coming from people speculating different things as if there was some emergency. Some people like me were able to get the benefit of this drama, although a very small percentage, but I should admit that I was able to get some extra redirection of traffic to my site because people were eager to find more and more information about this story and visited almost every page which even had ‘John Chow’ or ‘John Cow’ although in a different context. However, the question of being honest with your readers is quite sensitive as it would need to address the underlying issues like blog ethics. So I would prefer we let Mr.Chow take a call on this.
I think the whole structure of John Cow is that it is a mimick of John Chow. Since that’s the case, and the readers expect this type of thing from the site, I don’t see a breach of ethics at all. Although it is still very devious!
LOL. Really njoyed this article. Thank you.
Good to know that down-time does not mean extinction. Just having started my own blog, I have already faced a number of hurdles but I have found people to be really supportive.
Evil Cows… that’s the stuff of a bad horror movie
Hehe! Evil vanishing and re-appearing Cows! We’re all doomed!
I kind of figured it out last week when it was in your Bloglog.
hmm i never understood why anyone would want to sue that cow site anyways. now it all makes sense.
fatcow.com?
Does nobody else feel a bit let down? Maybe it’s just me.
yep, it’s just you
I don’t know. I thought that playing people like that was taking things a bit far. Oh well, just me. I still like their site.
Oh yes. You WILL be back! They knew it. I guess the question that you might have is…was it ethical to do something like that? Or immoral? If it were truly a hoax, like his child was sick and he needed money for her care, but he really used it for a trip to Vegas, then there would definitely be a backlash.
Not only You…
Ok…I understand the April fools joke about selling TTZ Media and the Blog, but this is just silly.
No – it’s evil!
Long live the evil
cows!
is it Cow rejected by TLA and Adsense. Right?
By Adsense? When it was rejected by adsense???
Cow is running adsense currently on his blog.
Who’s promoting who here? Is Chow promoting Cow or Cow promoting Chow – or is it an evil double team the likes of which we’ve never seen before!
In which case we’re all doomed!
Maybe it is Chow backup or mirror doing link bite each other.
Interesting that the Cows RSS subscription was down by 25% in one day. I wonder if that’s a standard sort of drop off?
With the number of RSS readers on this blog a 25% reduction is big numbers and a lot of people to replace!
Evil cows and evil chows! Now, that’s a team!
the evil one
I’ve got to admit, it was probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in my 5+ years as a blogger.
I just don’t see the point of generating such a buzz like that just to gain readers. There’s millions upon millions of ways to generate a buzz.
Fair enough April Fool’s Day, but to go out and deliberately deceive your readers like that is just horrible.
If I was advertising on that blog too, I’d say it was a breach of contract, and ask for a full refund.
I second that. It’s a little silly.
We apologize to everyone without a sense of humor.
Haha! Nothing to apologize about and I think most people realized what was going on.
Happy mooney making.
Long may the Cow continue!
It’s not about having a sense of humor, but the whole prank just wasn’t that funny. I’ll still read the blog, but I don’t get all these people sucking up to the Cow and telling him it was such a great joke. Maybe it’s ‘cos I’m British.
Yes, perhaps it is.
John Cow needs to try drier humor I guess.
Maybe Jackie Chan slapstick?
Damn, you cheated all your readers thinking them as guinea pigs, huh?
great article i enjoyd it.
Sometimes my blog is down for several minutes, I don’t know why. But when it happens, I hate it.
JohnCow posted that the redirect to this site was an accident, you say it was done by design…which is it?
Nice experiment. I also worry when my website doesnt work.
Are there any hosts that you would recommend against using? Bad experiences / Too much downtime / etc. for both large and small accounts?
So the big question was, did the link bait for for getting more readers to johnchow.com?