Introducing John Hurt
With the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who almost upon us, I’d like to take a recap of a website I made.
Spoilers about Doctor Who ahead.
I decided, on a whim, to create a website of John Hurt’s spinning head. Somehow, it managed over 30,000 hits in the 2 days afterwards, and 43,000+ to date. I’m still not sure how. Here’s something to recap and analyse the madness, including some things I wish I’d done better.
May 18th 2013
It’s a Saturday night, so I was out drinking. I don’t remember how or why, but we all ended up back at mine, drinking whisky.
I vaguely remember scrolling through twitter and seeing someone with the Twitter name of ‘Introducing JohnHurt’ and making jokes about it that were RT’d into my timeline. I had no idea what they were on about. I was a bit drunk. We decided to start watching The Name of The Doctor, the finale to the latest season of Doctor Who that had aired earlier that evening.
I love Doctor Who. It often falters and trips over its own confusion, but the ending of The Name of The Doctor was excellent. I loved it. It was a moment of pure and utter brilliance.
To see John Hurt, one of my favourite actors, turning around and being announced, with a bold on screen introduction, was a brilliant moment. They’d kept it a secret up until now, and this was the money shot.
The brilliance of the moment was only added to by the on screen text. I thought it was one of the funniest, most ridiculous things I’ve seen in a long while.
So in my drunken state, I decided to buy the domain introducingjohnhurt.com at 3am. I thought surely someone had purchased it before me, surely. But no, it was there for the taking. I threw down my money and went to sleep.
May 19th 2013
I woke up the next day with a plan. I was going to get my money’s worth out of that £12. I made a website.
The site itself was simple. I grabbed the first photo that looked suitable off Google (An all black background, perfect!), and used CSS3 animations with a dash of jQuery to spin it when you hover. Simple stuff, dredged from the weird part of my imagination...
It also had to play a ridiculous sound when you hovered, so I grabbed the Inception noise mp3. Sound effects make all the difference, as I’m sure those of you who have experienced Leap Motion Balloon Animals will know.
I always enjoy things that make me laugh as I’m making them, and this was no exception. Throughout the entire development I was laughing like an idiot. It was a ridiculous thing to see John Hurt’s face spin.
The final touches were to throw on a tweet button and a follow button. Luckily I had the sense to put Google Analytics on there too. A few frantic tests on mobile devices later, adding the viewport and other stuff, and it was ready to go.
It was go time.
I took a few carefully aimed tweets at people who I knew loved Doctor Who, and told them about it. A few RTs and tweets later, and the hits started coming.
And they didn’t stop. I looked on a whim at Analytics and 1,500 people were on the site. And it got higher. The number just kept rising.
A frantic twitter search and it turned out the guy making the ‘Introducing JohnHurt’ tweets the night before had quite a few followers. Simon from Yogscast. Even I’d heard of them. He RT’d a tweet of someone telling them about introducingjohnhurt.com.
It exploded. Doctor Who fans (aka Whovians) are a voracious bunch, and they shared it like mad.
Next thing, Oli Trenouth got in touch with me to tell me he took the photo. Thankfully he was fine with me using it, and I was more than happy to throw on a link to the Flickr. Great photo.
I was shocked. I didn’t expect this many hits. To get that many on something I’ve done was an incredibly pleasant surprise. I’m still chuffed.
The average visit of 20 seconds was an interesting one — that’s longer than I expected. But that’s enough time for someone to work it out, hover, laugh profusely, and then move on. And that’s fine by me.
And just as quickly as it peaked, the traffic dropped off. The internet moved on — it was only a silly joke on a Doctor Who episode, anyway.
What I learned
Tweets were the primary form of traffic for the site. Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful phenomenon, especially when it’s wrapped up in a pop culture behemoth like Who.
The Twitter button is a powerful tool. The huge majority of visits came through word of mouth on Twitter, and a vast majority of tweets came from the Tweet button. If people love something, they’ll recognise that button and hit it and send it. A lot of people didn’t edit the default message, so it was easy to glance at my #introducingjohnhurt feed and see what was being said. And it was an overwhelmingly positive response, with a healthy amount of “WTF?’s” in there too.
I also gained about 100-150 followers on Twitter, which felt low considering the amount of visitors. I can only guess that people don’t like hitting the ‘Follow Person’ button, blindly following them without first checking out their feed. A link to my Twitter may have been preferred.
Failures
I screwed up on the sound file. I threw on the HTML5 <audio> tag, added the mp3, and forgot all about it. Firefox and iOS Safari (to name a few) can’t play mp3, because it’s a closed format. So it wasn’t for a quite a while after that I converted the file to ogg and m4a. Woops.
I wish I had counted spins. I wish I’d hooked up the spins to Analytics so I could say how many times John Hurt’s face had been spun. That would have been amazing.
The reboot was a failure. Unlike Doctor Who’s reboot, my attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Doctor Who’s new announcement of the 12th Doctor was a failure. I tried something clever to announce that John Hurt should be the 12th Doctor, and it took a few hours to make. It got about 1k-2k hits, and that’s low considering the effort I put in. However, making it was hilarious fun, and I still think it’s funny. You can view it here. I ended up swapping it back to the old Introducing John Hurt.
Things to Improve
Exposure was entirely through word of mouth. As far as I’m aware it didn’t get on any Doctor Who fansites or news sites like DigitalSpy. That was a shame.
SEO was another thing I could have improved. If you type in Introducing John Hurt, you’ll still get the site, which is nice.
Wrap Up
I hope you’ve made it to the end of this waffly write-up. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and enjoyed spinning Hurt’s face as much as I did. In the end, the site was a flash in the pan and just a bit of fun, but that’s all I ever hoped it would be. Watching the analytics was jaw dropping stuff, and I thank everyone who visited it.
It’s amazing to think the biggest thing I’ve made to date was a spinning photo of John Hurt’s face.
Doctor Who’s arc of The War Doctor, leading to the 50th Anniversary, has continued to surprise and entertain me. We’re now just over a week away from the 50th Anniversary, and I truly hope it delivers. Seeing a brilliant actor such as Hurt playing such a crucial character brings me joy.
P.S. The Night of the Doctor is the best Doctor Who episode I’ve ever seen.
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