/Interview/ The brains behind: One Million Giraffes
20/07/2010 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Norwegian web developer Ola Helland made a bet with his friend to crowd-source one million hand-made giraffes. We caught up with him to hear the full story
.net: Why did you decide to crowd source one million giraffes via the internet?
OH: The whole thing started as a drunken bet with my friend, Jørgen, late one Friday night in June last year. We were talking about the internet and how amazingly big it has become. Everyone is connected all the time and with social media you can reach the world within seconds. It’s mind blowing! So I said that nowadays it would be easy to get one million giraffes sent to me. Jørgen protested and said there was no way I could do that. So we did the only reasonable thing to do when you’re kinda drunk; we made a bet. We set a time frame (the collection needed to be done before 2011) and made two rules: no computer-generated giraffes allowed and every giraffe needed to be hand-made by the person who sent it in. No toys, no photos from zoos, no sculptures from Africa. Only hand-made giraffes allowed. Oh, and if I made it, I’d win a case of beer. A couple of days later I launched www.onemilliongiraffes.com as a joke and my life will never be the same again.
.net: What’s the feedback been like since the site went live?
OH: The feedback has been unbelievable! People from all around the world are doing me a favour and they’re asking for nothing in return! It’s amazing. I’ve got almost 9,000 emails with nothing but kind and encouraging words and on average I get about 2,300 giraffes every day. The day record is a whooping 30,485 giraffes! The website just passed 6million hits and there’s no end in sight. I’ve lost count of the thousands of blogs and tweets about the project. I’m forever grateful for all the help I’ve been given.
I get all kinds of giraffes. Most of them are drawn, but some people get really creative with physical objects. The submissions make me laugh every single day. All kinds of people participate, everyone from the clearly professional drawer to the 38-year-old who hasn’t drawn since he was 10. Everyone is welcome to draw and I accept anything that kinda looks like a giraffe. Oh, and I run a blog on the website where I select a ‘giraffe of the day’ to highlight some of the giraffes that I feel are extra special in some way.
.net: How fast did the project go viral?
OH: I didn’t really think it would exit my circle of friends. But I got giraffes from people I don’t know from countries I’ve never been to the same day I launched the website. The website slowly grew and got spread around the interwebs through social media for eight weeks when it suddenly exploded on day 62. I hit the front page of the biggest newspaper in Lithuania and the Polish social bookmarking site Wykop.pl that day and things went nuts. I went from a couple of thousand giraffes a day to more than 10,000 giraffes a day. It was absolutely insane and for the first time I thought I might actually be able to do this. But I’m not too sure if I actually did anything to make that happen. I feel that the fact that I answer every email personally, comment on people’s blog posts thanking them for spreading the word about the project, answer every tweet, every Facebook comment and keep the website open for suggestions is a big part of the success of this project. I truly believe that you have to open and listen to your users (in real time) if you want to make a successful website. And not just listen to them, but also act on the good ideas, so the website is constantly evolving into a better and better product. And I think the simple and naive idea behind the project is also a big part of the success. I think people easily fall in love with the idea that one man is single-handedly trying to prove a point to his friend by summoning the entire world to do something so silly as drawing giraffes.
.net: How did you build the site? What tools and technologies did you use?
OH: I built the website myself in PHP and MySQL. I work as a web developer, so it was no problem at all to make it myself. I use jQuery for some fancy animations and Google Charts for the statistics. I love that the website feels easy to use and I’ve received lots of compliments for it. It was even nominated for website of the year by Metro UK!
.net: How much bandwidth does the site gobble up and how do you finance it?
OH: The website gets a steady amount of traffic nowadays, but the peaks are at 8MBps according to my cPanel. I don’t really know too much about things like this, I’m just a programmer. But I know it’s expensive and I pay for everything myself. I’ve had several offers for sponsorships but I’ve rejected them all. I refuse to make any money from this. If I get the million giraffes, I win a case a beer from my friend Jørgen and that will be more than enough payment for me. But in an effort to try to reduce the expense, I’ve made a game where you can guess the age of the creator of giraffes. The game is really simple and a lot of fun. And there are Google Ads on it, so I make a little money for every guess you make. There are also Google Ads on the blog, but I feel like that’s okay since it’s not part of the main site. Most people just look through the giraffe gallery. If you dig a little deeper into the site, you’ll find lots of cool stuff, but there might be ads there as well. I hate that they’re there, but I’m not by any means a rich man and at times it’s been hard to make the payments necessary to keep the project running. The ads help, but I can assure you that I don’t make any money off this. At all.
.net: How much time do you spend on the site every day?
OH: Running the website doesn’t really take too much time. I’ve built the entire site myself and have streamlined the ‘giraffe approval process’ to fit my needs perfectly. There are days when I only approve uploaded giraffes, and that just takes a few minutes of my time. But on other days I spend hours approving giraffes from Facebook, Twitter (I’ve built my own Twitter client to make the process easier), web links, regular mail, MMS and email. Answering over 8,000 emails is by far the task that takes up the most time. So on average I’d say I spend about 20-30 minutes on the project every day. But it varies a lot depending on how I feel that day...
.net: Please share some of your favourite stats with us.
OH: I’m very proud of the fact that I’m probably the only person in history who has ever done this! So just the fact that I have more than 830,000 giraffes is amazing to me. I also love the fact that the average age of the contributors (that have chosen to give me their age) is 24.6 years old. In the beginning, people thought that only kids could participate since ‘only kids draw’, but that’s not true at all! The oldest contributor is a 104-year-old blind (!) woman from Finland. Her nurse told her about the project and she loved it. She’d been a fan of giraffes all her life and immediately started drawing. 104 years old! That alone is worth all the work I’ve put into this. And 101 countries have participated. I love travelling and I’ve been around the world seeing the sights, so it’s a lot of fun for me to see giraffes pouring in from places I’ve been. 101 countries is unbelievable! I’m just an idiot from Norway who made a drunken bet and now 101 countries have helped me out. I’m the happiest man alive when I think about that.
.net: What’s been your favourite giraffe so far?
OH: It’s impossible for me to pick one giraffe out of the 800,000+ I’ve seen in the past 11 months. But I get this question a lot and that’s why I decided to start the giraffe blog, where I pick a giraffe that I like every day. There really are too many cool giraffes in the collection to just pick one, but my blog highlights most of them, so please check it out.
.net: How many giraffes have you had to reject and why?
OH: I’ve rejected over 16,000 giraffes by now. Most of them are photos of real giraffes from zoos and safaris that people have been to. But there’s a whole bunch of computer-made giraffes as well. And duplicates! A lot of people get really impatient when they’ve uploaded or emailed their giraffe, so they do it again. And again. And again. So when I finally get to their giraffes I have to reject all the duplicates. And the users of the site report on average one duplicate every day. So people help me out making the collection better. I love that!
.net: What are you planning to do once you reach your milestone?
OH: I have no concrete plans, I’m just really focused on getting that million first. Once I’ve done that I can think about what to do afterwards. But there will probably be a book about the project, maybe an art exhibit and I will try to donate the material to a charity and ask if they can use it for something good. We’ll see what happens. I need the million first!
Bookmark with:
Comments
Mpho / 20/07/2010 / 14:20
This is a fantastic project Ola. Now that you know that the world is closer than we thought, how about coming up with another web based project but that directly contributes to charities and other social initiatives.
Martin / 21/07/2010 / 18:08 / http://www.redolawebdesign.co.uk
I remember reading about this one year ago on Reddit - the top comment was "He won't make it. He needs like 1700 drawings/day to make his goal."
How wrong can you be? But I certainly don't envy his bandwidth costs.
Ola / 22/07/2010 / 10:26 / http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/
@Mpho: Ive tried to get charities involved in this project, but they all hesitated with it. When the book is out and I've covered my bandwidth costs whatever profit there is left will be given to WWF...
@Martin: Hahaha. Yeah! I'd love to have time to go back to all those comments and blogposts saying the project is fun, but that there is no way it's gonna work. I love proving people wrong. Especially when they dont believe in the good of people!
Tommy / 23/08/2010 / 07:40 / http://fotokarten.wordpress.com/
Great article...I really enjoyed reading it! :)
