I'm not picking on you here: I think one of the reasons this issue gives us fits is that we think about it in terms of "gaining and sustaining traffic", which is somewhere in the general vicinity of an actual business goal, but not quite there.  "Traffic" is not valuable per se and often people optimize for it in ways which are counterproductive for the business.  For example, if you get featured on TechCrunch, you will certainly get a lot of "traffic", but what does that get you, really?  A few dozen comments saying the design of your front page would look better in blue, your VPS chugs under load, and "didn't Taxi.derm.me already do this last year"?  And then tomorrow they'll have forgotten about you.<p>But people spend <i>insane</i> amounts of time and effort trying to get on TechCrunch, when they could spend that time writing pitches to blogs whose owners will melt to know anyone who is reading them, or writing systems to make pillar content which will be attract qualified, interested prospects for the next <i>decade</i>.<p>And even for those few (arguably) lucky folks who make it onto Techcrunch, they might assume that if getting a big splash "gains" traffic then subsequent big splashes are needed to "sustain" it, throwing an increasing amount of resources to further pessimize their business to fit the preferences of a narrow, fickle audience who does not spend money on the stuff they have to sell.