Going Viral on WordPress.com: 26 Million Views and Counting — Seth’s Story

On November 2, 2013, Seth Smith hit publish on an article entitled Marriage Isn’t For You. Within a few hours, his self-hosted WordPress site couldn t handle the tens of thousands of visitors reading the post. He moved his article and then his entire site over to WordPress.com, where the WordPress.com team did some additional tweaks to keep his site up and ready for the ten million visitors who would end up visiting his site in a single day. The article has since received 26 million total views. We talked to Seth about going viral on WordPress.com. Q: Did you anticipate that your post would get that many readers? A: Not at all! In my wildest dreams I thought that maybe, just maybe, that post would have received 3,000 to 5,000 views. To me, that would have been wonderful. So the fact that it’s had over 26 million views has been quite the shock! Q: How did you first notice that it was getting attention? A: Well, I noticed something was up when my brother-in-law posted it on
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