Japanese Traffic Shuts Down Our Site
We woke up this morning to discover that one of our web sites had been shut down. This cut the links to many of our online store images, which we host remotely from our shop provider. Needless to say the situation sent us scrambling to find out what was going on.
Apparently, we had created quite a buzz in Japan.
Last month, a rotating National holiday fell on a date, so that when spoken in Japanese it sounded like the word for masturbation.
See previous thread: Japanese Masturbation Day
Because of the language idiosyncrasy, we thought it an interesting topic to do a design for. We focus our shop on all things Japanese and Chinese, after all.
We do not do a lot to promote our shop in Japan, even though we have an office there and do generate some sales. So this attention really caught us off guard.
It would seem a popular tech web site featured our masturbation design, and the hits went through the roof. Over 20,000 hits (yes, twenty thousand) from 7,000 users in less than 24 hours.
http://techside.net/news_log/newslog.html
We host some images on our own site server, because we use a php script to rotate them as featured products. Our Internet service provider in America actually had to shut down our web site to break the link, because their servers were nearing over-capacity from all the traffic. (Our server is back on, minus a disruptive php file).
The Japanese are amused that an American web store would sell wacky items with a Japanese theme (as if the Japanese don't have enough wacky items they make and sell to themselves). We realized the design would be limited to individuals with a hard-core like for all things Japanese. But we never expected the Japanese themselves to pick-up on it like they did.
This increased traffic for us has only translated (pardon the pun) into a great deal of disruption in our workload. Of course, if "hits" were dollars we could all retire after a couple days. No such luck yet.
Apparently, we had created quite a buzz in Japan.
Last month, a rotating National holiday fell on a date, so that when spoken in Japanese it sounded like the word for masturbation.
See previous thread: Japanese Masturbation Day
Because of the language idiosyncrasy, we thought it an interesting topic to do a design for. We focus our shop on all things Japanese and Chinese, after all.
We do not do a lot to promote our shop in Japan, even though we have an office there and do generate some sales. So this attention really caught us off guard.
It would seem a popular tech web site featured our masturbation design, and the hits went through the roof. Over 20,000 hits (yes, twenty thousand) from 7,000 users in less than 24 hours.
http://techside.net/news_log/newslog.html
We host some images on our own site server, because we use a php script to rotate them as featured products. Our Internet service provider in America actually had to shut down our web site to break the link, because their servers were nearing over-capacity from all the traffic. (Our server is back on, minus a disruptive php file).
The Japanese are amused that an American web store would sell wacky items with a Japanese theme (as if the Japanese don't have enough wacky items they make and sell to themselves). We realized the design would be limited to individuals with a hard-core like for all things Japanese. But we never expected the Japanese themselves to pick-up on it like they did.
This increased traffic for us has only translated (pardon the pun) into a great deal of disruption in our workload. Of course, if "hits" were dollars we could all retire after a couple days. No such luck yet.
posted by Han Translation at 1:23 PM
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