Skittles Experiment

Skittles recently changed its website in an interesting way. Skittles.com currently redirects to a twitter search for Skittles. This has led to people spamming Twitter with Skittles-related messages, that also contain other content, such as anti-Scientology slogans or links to a blog. But how effective is such a thing, really?

This is an EXPERIMENT to see whether this works. Please note that I AM NOT MAKING MONEY OFF OF THIS. There is no adsense on the site.

I just wanted to see what would happen if I tried to spam skittles.com. Would I be able to get lots of extra traffic? For this purpose I created a new twitter account, whyskittles. FOR SCIENCE!

8:33 PM Eastern: First tweet sent out.
8:39 PM Eastern: Nine hits have resulted from it. Hmm.
8:41 PM Eastern: Second tweet sent out.
8:46 PM Eastern: Five more hits. A couple of them have viewed multiple pages but most haven't.
8:52 PM Eastern: I got an @ reply! I replied back and included the link again. So far my stats for today is 28 visits, 35 page views.
9:03 PM Eastern: I've been spamming a bunch and it's getting results. Usually I'm lucky to get five hits a day, but so far my traffic today is 64 visits, 76 views.
9:07 PM Eastern: I haven't been tweeting since that last update, and my most recent one has fallen off the skittles main page. My current stats are 89/107, and I'm going to give it a rest to see if it tapers off.
9:13 PM Eastern: Yeah, definitely a drop-off in traffic after getting pushed off the front page...
9:19 PM Eastern: I tried a dirty trick and I made a tweet with a variety of other highly popular keywords, but it didn't work very well and I haven't gotten any new hits from those searches. Current stats 97/116

CONCLUSION
It's 9:23 and my stats are 98 views and 117 page hits. And I'm just about done. I've come to the conclusion that through pointless inane advertising, I was definitely able to bring a lot of people to the site, and a couple of those people even viewed multiple pages, but in the end, I don't think it really matters.

As I suspect we already knew, cheap tricks like this are good for some quick traffic, but what you really need to do is something that's going to keep people coming back, and the Skittles Experiment doesn't really offer that.

So, I'm officially calling the experiment over.

Feel free to post in the comments.