A few years ago I wrote a very basic and seemingly pointless website in the middle of the night that blew up and turned into one of my most arguably ‘successful’ (not in the traditional sense) side projects. As a by-product, I now have a very interesting case study on the nature of internet culture that I am going to share with you.

So begins a tale of hackers, copycats, gamification, KISS, advertising, scoreboards, stats, product development principles, game theory and ultimately how I generated millions of interactions in a game that consists of only one button.

Google "one billion clicks" if you want to play along while you read. It's the top result.

Keep it Simple

Many budding entrepreneurs who have a "big idea" fall into the same trap: they get carried away with their grand vision and forget to keep it simple. This can make it a nightmare to develop, almost impossible to launch, and even if it does launch, people may just not “get it”. The key to trying out new ideas with minimum risk is to keep it simple.

If you are embarking on building something new, you need to ask yourself one important question:

What are the core elements of this project that it cannot function without?

Once you have identified these, TAKE EVERYTHING ELSE OUT.

You can put all that fluff back in later once you have proven that the fundamentals of the project actually work. Why build in a hundred features to your new product if the public simply don't want the product in the first place? It's a lot to spend on a hunch.

This approach can be applied to many aspects of marketing & communication such as copywriting, UI, UX, graphic design, branding and strategy.

In product development we call it the “minimal viable product”; the most basic version of the product that requires the least investment to test. I have seen so many projects with great potential fail because the project lead has got carried away with their own vision and completely overcomplicated the delivery.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

This one rule will help you avoid so many problems, it's hard to overstate how important it is.

One Button to Rule Them All

Back at uni, I had toyed with the idea of single button games – I even designed and wrote a game for my final end of year project “Extreme Hamster Cannon” which only used the space bar to control all the actions in the game (firing a hamster across a screen to hit a target of course). It was a surprisingly compelling gaming experience and gained a lot of attention at my end of year show.

This got me thinking….

What is the simplest game I can write?

How much can I take out of a game and still be able to call it a "game"?

Could I make a website that just had one button on it, and then ask people to press the button?

Would people actually do it?

Hey, of course they would, this is the internet!

So I registered a domain (onebillionclicks.net) and started writing some code…

A Busy Night



I set about writing a website with just one button in the middle and all I planned to do was ask people to press that button, then I would count how many times it was pressed.

THAT’S IT. I'M A GENIUS, RIGHT? #AMA

During testing I recorded about 600 clicks, so I wrote “600” on my notepad on my desk and went to sleep.

I woke up the following morning to find that my website had taken 72 thousand clicks overnight.

Obviously my first knee jerk reaction was,

“I’m going to be rich……I don’t know how, but this is the one, this is the goldmine I have been trying to hit for years, I’ve done it, I can now sit back and just watch the money come in”

I always thought I was destined for something greater than inventing the world's most basic click farm...

So my "One Billion Clicks" project was born, I pondered...

How long would it take for the collective power of the online public to generate a billion clicks?

Turns out a billion is a very very big number.

Paid, Owned and Earned

I work in creative advertising and have spent part of my career working within a large online media buying/publishing environment so I know my way around the world of media. I always recommend putting some budget aside for paid media, as the "build it and they will come" approach doesn't work in practice. You need to bring people in with paid media and then hope you have made it engaging enough that people will share it with their friends and continue the spread organically.

I didn't own any other high traffic websites at the time to put my message through so I just had to focus on getting my paid strategy right: Minimum spend, maximum reach.

I had heard that stumbleupon had a paid offering that was (at the time) an extremely cheap (5cent per stumble) way to get engaged eyeballs onto your content. The unique quality of a visitor via paid stumble is that they are in a state where they are actively looking for new, random, surprising content. A traditional advert tries to hijack the users current experience and lead them over to the advertised product. Even a contextual advert aims to jump in where you are looking at one thing and lead you across to something else. A stumble upon user is presented with a piece of content without knowing it's a paid advert. They have asked the website to show them something new, so they are not put off when presented with something unexpected.

What this results in is an extremely engaged audience that is in the frame of mind to investigate your website a little before moving on. If this audience is presented with a button that says "click me", the likelihood is that they will actually click it.

At 5cent per stumble, my $500 on paid stumbles brought a lot of new traffic and helped spark the spread of the website at the beginning.

It's worth noting that paid stumbles are not effective on all campaigns, I have tried paid stumbles a few times and the correct choice of paid media should very much depend on the project you are launching and the audience you want to reach.

Release the Hackers...

The first challenge I encountered from here was hackers. I really had not anticipated how much Internet love I would get from wave after wave of people trying to hack my website and break my system.

So I added a captcha. Right, job done, it's secure. To my naivety at the time, I thought that would be enough. My average dev skills were about to be pushed to their limits. The attacks kept on coming. I added more security checks…..the hacks kept coming. Each time I added something new, they would find another way to exploit my website. I called on friends from the developer community and gradually managed to put some more robust systems in place that ensure the website was secure. I am not going to discuss in detail as this would be like a red rag to a bull for some parts of the internet.

There Will be Copycats!

After about a week of being live, a friend of mine messaged me and told me that there was another site that had sprung up that was almost identical as mine. A simple button in the middle, seeing how long it would take to generate a billion clicks. "Co-incidentally", this site had been turned live a few days after mine.

I was initially a little annoyed that someone was trying to cash in on my “game changing” idea but this faded after a few hours and the more logical side of my mind took over. If someone has taken the time to copy my site, they must think it has some sort of potential, that’s good I suppose, right? Nothing is truly original these days anyways, we all borrow inspiration from each other.

I was going to create a youtube video and call them out on it but I decided this would only validate their website and potentially generate them traffic in the process. Their site was really rough around the edges and despite my average dev skills, I had created a better product.

I decided to simply focus on making my website better than theirs and hope they would just fade away. I had the advantage of being a designer as well as a developer so I could ensure my website at least looked half decent.

Over the coming weeks as, I made more improvements to my page, this copycat website did eventually fade and I believe it is no longer online these days.

Moneytizing a Popular Website

Right, next step was to turn this click farm into a money printing machine. So I committed the cardinal sin that many website owners do: I added banners. Banners to the left, banners to the right, hell why not some banners top and bottom too? More banners means more money, everyone knows that.

I saw the average clicks per user drop by almost half overnight.

Turns out people don't like banners. After a few months of running with banners, I checked my Adsense account and I had collected about $15 in ad revenue. I decided it wasn't worth the money and I would rather have a clean site that people like using rather than some pocket change for spamming my users with advertising.

This project really wasn't about the money, so the banners came down.

Gamification for the Win

Yeah I know it’s a buzzword and it makes me cringe slightly when I hear marketeers use it but this was a defining addition to the website and the driving force behind the insane levels of engagement I am now seeing.

The simplest and most effective addition was when I added a top 100 users scoreboard. When users submitted their "clicks", I added a field where they could add their name and then they would be entered into the global scoreboard. This had a profound effect on the average clicks per user as people could then see how well they were doing against other users. A user would add their clicks, see their name in the scoreboard and how far they are away from the next position up, then they would go round again and make a point of entering more clicks to get a high position. Some of the people at the top of the scoreboard had literally spent days on the website clicking.

Once the top 100 got flooded out with high scores, the average clicks started to drop off again. People were losing motivation because it was getting difficult to get your name visible in the scoreboard. It was amazing to watch it happen.

So I upped the top 100 to the top 500. The average clicks per person rose back up again.

The same happened once the top 500 started getting crowded with high scores. So I upped it again, this time to the top 1000. Again the average clicks climbed back up. People want to see their name on that board, don't ask me why.

Levels and Feedback

Another gaming inspired element I added was the feedback loop on the button itself. Games typically have levels, ratings or rankings for how well the player is doing during play. This feedback encourages the player to continue. I started adding updates and comments around the button when the user broke certain milestones, like the first 100 or 1000. This had a notable effect on average clicks per person.

People love stats

Finally, as anybody who has friends who play Battlefield or COD will know, gamers love stats. Well, I would even go one step further to say that all people in general love stats.

How many calories have I eaten today?

How many footsteps have I taken?

How far have I driven in the past year?

How many air miles have I collected?

How many hours of gameplay have I spent in Battlefield? (I'm at over 200)

Give the public stats and they will love you. This was the final element that the site was missing so I published stats around the experiment as a reward for submitting clicks: How long its been live, how far away we are from a billion and how long it will take at current pace.

These stats gave the game far more depth than simply a clicky button and created a story that could be told of the experiment as well as a reward for users to see that they are taking part in something much bigger than themselves. The stats on how long people have spent clicking on this website are mind boggling.

So What Now?

The majority of people I have told this story to simply say,

“why on earth would anyone want to take part? It seems like a rubbish game”

A valid observation, but this wouldn’t be the question I would ask. If you understand the nature of the internet, asking “Why?” is probably irrelevant. I could go on at length talking about how people behave online, memes, pure boredom, hive mentality, low barrier of entry, gamification techniques, virality etc, but from where I am sitting, you just have to look at the results to see it's working.

A few people I have talked to have skipped the “this is stupid, why would you care about it?”..and turned to me at the end of my (usually drunken and animated story) and said

“right, what can we do with this?”

This, for me, is the more insightful question. I am yet to find the answer though.

So Now What?

Well who knows really, I have a number of other projects on right now that I am focussing on and Billion Clicks is just sitting there doing its thing. Maybe one day I will return as an old man and find that it has fulfilled its lifetime purpose and reached a billion.

I launched my most recent project last month which follows almost exactly the same principles outlined above for Billion Clicks. It aims to be the most simple lifestyle and self improvement tracker on the market. If you have android, you can download "Track All The Things" from the play store for free right now.

Check it out, it's free!

I've compiled these simple rules to summarise.

Keep it simple Put some money aside for media Hackers will hack anything There will be copycats Use advertising carefully Users love scoreboards Give the people their stats

Come see me talk about Gamification at VIVID Festival Sydney!

I will be appearing on behalf of my agency circul8, as a speaker at GAME ON 2015 as part of VIVID Sydney discussing "gamification as a pathway to purchase".

Come down and join me in person to chat all things gamified in marketing.