THE NIN HOTLINE

Remember that contest LiveNation put out ("Bad idea, bad execution and no input from the acts")? Post a buggy Flash widget to your site, spam people with it for a chance to win free tickets, with the grand prize being an expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles to see Nine Inch Nails? The contest closed April 13th, with really terrible results. Well, unless you were Atrain, who was in 1st place, sharing with 149 people during the course of the contest. He was contacted by LiveNation a couple of days ago as the winner - a good bit later than the 72 hour wait mentioned in the contest rules.

However, no one else in the top 5 has heard anything from anyone involved with the contest. I know this because I'm was in 2nd and 5th place at the close of the contest, and because the 3rd and 4th place winners have contacted me, also having not heard anything about winning.

Why was I in both 2nd and 5th place? Signing up for the contest the first time, I believe I was getting the wrong share codes, as people were testing my links out and I was getting no record of it on the leaderboard, so I created a second account, which worked only a little bit better. bwary went into greater depth on ETS, and was able to determine exactly how many people successfully were recorded using the widget as of April 14.

We get 60,000 visitors a month to the NIN Hotline. I also published a link to our widget on Echoing The Sound to a thread that's been viewed thousands of times - and somehow this widget only recorded 29 referrals from us. In fact, based on bwary's numbers, only 686 people installed the widget, period. The fourth place winner made it to fourth place by referring four people.

The whole thing couldn't have been handled more poorly. Way to go, LiveNation!