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Add the andPOP Facebook Application(andPOP) - A very simple marketing scheme from Mozilla worked so well that it almost backfired, simply because too many people took up the company’s challenge to download 5 million copies of its new browser, Firefox 3, in a 24 hour period.
Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that it would be releasing the new version of their browser software, Firefox 3, on Tuesday, June 17. Mozilla gave users a goal: get as many people as possible to download Firefox 3 on June 17 to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period. The goal was to download 5 million copies of Firefox 3 onto computer across the world, according to Dwight Silverman’s blog on the Houston Chronicle website.
The software was formally released at noon on June 17, and so many people tried to download Firefox 3 at once that the server crashed. The website was up and running by 1:18 pm and the clock for the record was reset, according to Silverman. Four hours before the end of the 24-hour time, Mozilla had far surpassed its goal – by 1.1 million. At one point 9,000 downloads a minute were occurring., according to Mozilla’s corporate blog.
News of the downloading frenzy found its way into the front pages of many media outlets, including BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News. Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to Google news, according to Silverman’s post.
In the end, over 8.3 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded. More than 2.5 million of those downloads were in the United States.
