So, I thought I’d take a look for myself. I headed over to @StephenFry‘s Twitter page (its worth pointing out that he has over 450,000 followers) and saw he had indeed tweeted a URL that was available to buy.

@StephenFry tweeted :

(what he meant to tweet was votematch.co.uk)

So I proceeded to buy votingmatch.co.uk from Heart Internet, at a total cost of £6.42.

I then frantically ran about my room trying to think of ways to monetise this (what I believed to be very shortlived) traffic.

The first thing I did, within about 2 minutes of buying the domain, was redirect all traffic to Amazon (obviously via my affiliate link). In my experience of Amazon, clicks tend to convert very well. In this case, I wasnt expecting much, it was just a filler until I thought of something better.

After about 30 minutes (I was in the process of watching X-Men and I kept getting distracted) I changed the link to point to Betfair. Im on a pretty dang good deal with Betfair, so figured it was worth a shot for another half hour.

I then received the following tweet

I swiftly headed over to Adult Friend Finder and signed up for their affiliate program. I felt slightly bad for pointing all the unsuspecting traffic to what is pretty much a swingers site. At the same time though, I felt devilishly excited!

So, up until now, votingmatch.co.uk has been redirecting to Adult Friend Finder. I am on a pay per click model, the more people that sign up, the more I get paid.

If I’m honest, I didn’t think Id actually make anything from this whole thing, it was just a bit of fun. However I woke up today and found Id made a wee bit of commission:

• Amazon – Sold 6 products, including one of these, so a commission total of roughly £17.00
• Betfair – Although the site was only redirecting to Betfair for 30 mins, I managed to get a sign up, so another £30 commission!
• Adult Friend Finder – Currently sitting on $9.72 (not much, but it all adds up), which converts to roughly £6.

So overall, I spent just over £6 on the domain and earned £53 (or thereabouts) and the commission at Adult Friend Finder is still ticking away nicely!

So overall, it was a worthwhile exercise. It also provided me with a lot of happiness as I saw a lot of Stephen Fry followers desperately attempting to alert him of his mistake. Stephen’s been online since, and has corrected his error by posting a new url, in the meantime I’m still getting a big bundle of traffic. (He could delete the link, maybe he wants me to make a few quid)

If anyone wants to purchase votingmatch.co.uk let me know, cos Im sure it wont be much use to me in a day or two!

If anyone knows Stephen Fry personally, tell him I owe him a pint!

Thanks for reading,

Mark (or @hairycornflakes or Twitter)