It Hurts So Good
For the past 15 years or so, I have coached youth lacrosse. Usually eigth graders, sometimes younger, but always about the time when growth spurts occur. In fact, every year there is a kid that shuffles, limps or hops when he runs because of the pain, the growing pains, in his legs.
The nice thing is that as soon as it passes, the kid is usually a much better player, and often truly excels at the sport.
Startups are often the same way. Yesterday, we were written up in TechCrunch. The focus of the article was: Lijit was slow, they figured it out, and now they are growing quickly again, landing a great partnership. Just like the lacrosse kids. We experienced growing pains, learned from them, and have begun to grow even more quickly because of them.
We also learnedhow our product worked with larger networks. Like the TechCrunch article said, we increased b5media’s overall pageviews by 1.5%, and that was with two search boxes and a below the fold placement.
But that wasnt the only interesting statistic. Approximately 23% of all clicks on a search results page went to a site other than the original publication. Meaning that 23% of the clicks were cross-promotional in nature. This was a great discovery since one of the core values of Lijit is helping readers discover new content. In essence, 23% of the readers searching across the b5media network were finding sites that they may have never known existed, driving additional readership and pageviews.
Our learnings were simple: 1) search is hard to do well; 2) search has to be fast; and 3) search has to be relevant to be useful. As we continue to innovate our product, we are finding new and interesting successes and challenges, and we while we hope that our growth continues at the same rate, we are ultra focused on ensuring both speed and relevance.
Interestingly enough, we arent the only startup that has faced rapid growth and scaling issues because of it:
Hopefully, we all learn a few lessons along the way… 
And, if you are a publisher network looking to drive some additional page views and cross promotional traffic, please drop me a line at micah [at] lijit [dot] com. I promise to hook you up!