An interesting experiment on Sunday

Last Sunday (Nov 2, 2008), an interesting Internet experiment occurred. Berkeley Breathed, creator of the comic strip "Opus", tried to cross mediums. In his final entry in the strip, which appeared in Sunday papers all across the country, he made readers go to www.humanesociety.org/opus to see the final panel.

So the obvious question is: How many people made the jump? The answer can be found on Alexa:

Traffic History Graph for humanesociety.org

Not very many. There's a tiny bump seen in the humane society's traffic. Only a few thousand people (out of the millions who saw the strip) went from the newspaper to the web.

One reason for this: it is generally hard to get people to switch from one medium to another. If you run an ad on the radio, on TV or in a magazine, it is hard to move people to the Web unless there is a very compelling reason to go. Similarly, it is hard to move people from the web to another medium. Something to think about as you are planning ad campaigns.