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AllofMP3's downtime worked out as effective advertising
The most common way a website promotes itself is through the use of advertising. However, when a very popular website runs into legal issues or goes down for a few days, this leads consumers to the belief that it has been shutdown and thus the news about this goes widespread. Well, according to the Register, this seems to be just what happened with the controversial Russian music download store AllofMP3.com.
Just recently, the Russian authorities seized several of the AllofMP3 servers and then all the sudden the website went down with a basic message saying it is down for maintenance. After a few days, this lead people to believe that they were ordered to shut down and thus there was widespread news about this downtime just before the website came back up again. While this downtime meant an inconvenience for its customers and lost sales during those few days, it also doubled up as effective advertising for the site, since statistics by Alexia shows that traffic to the website has over doubled from around 600 per million to around 1,300 per million; exceeeding that of even Napster.
Unlike DRM based music services like iTunes, Napster, Yahoo and so on, AllofMP3 allows its customers to purchase music encoded in a choice of a wide range of audio codecs, with some songs offered up to CD quality. However, unlike other music services, they charge by the Megabyte and only appear to pay royalty charges for "broadcasting" the music instead of by the song, since they are relying on a loophole in the weak Russian copyright law.

posted by Jerry permanent link