I am very, very intrigued by the Justin.tv project. The whole thing is kind of mindless but I find myself checking in on what he is up to at least once or twice a day. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Do a TwitterSearch on Justin.tv and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what kind of traffic numbers that they’ve had since they launched last week but judging by the degraded video quality recently, I can only imagine that their traffic has been going up steadily. They got a lot of good initial momentum from a post on TechCrunch. But that can only take you so far. Plenty of promising companies have seen an initial spike in traffic after getting mentioned on TechCrunch only to see there traffic level off or go down over time. I think one of the key marketing tools for Justin.tv has been their use of Twitter and posting their phone number (415-948-3219) on the Justin.tv web site so that he can receive calls and text messages from his audience. I don’t know when they decided to use Twitter as one of their marketing channels but the timing couldn’t have been better. Everybody on Twitter seems to be saying something about Justin.tv. This includes heavy hitters like Thomas Hawk, Scott Beale (Laughing Squid), Nick Douglas, Jason Calacanis, and Dave Winer. Scott has a great post today describing his meeting with him last night at Bar None on Union Street in San Francisco. Many people, including myself, saw Scott’s tweet about heading over to Bar None to meet up with Justin.tv. I ended up tuning in to Justin.tv later that night and saw Scott talking to Justin. I had a feeling that Scott would be blogging about his Justin.tv meet-up so I took a few screenshots and sent them off to Scott. He ended up using one of them in his blog post today.

Yes, I know, this whole thing sounds like a big waste of time but I find this thing to be a really interesting mix of technology, social experiment, and innovative marketing. This is another example of a new form of entertainment where the audience is also the content of his show. And by having an audience of bloggers, he is getting the added bonus of his audience promoting his show. For free. That’s viral marketing in it’s purest form. I predict that we will see Justin on a major talk show in the next month or so (Jimmy Kimmel, Good Morning America, etc.). And it will be fascinating to tune into Justin.tv when those interviews happen. We’ll be able to follow along (from his point of view) when he arrives at the set, hang out in the green room with him, walk on to the stage, and look into the camera and the bright lights when the interview starts.

Update:
After taking a closer look at the chat room on Justin.tv I am less enthusiastic about their chances for mainstream success. That chat room is an unfiltered stream of really hateful comments. They either need to turn that chat room off or limit it to people who have gone through some kind of approval process. Maybe stream messages directed to Justin.tv on Twitter? That way there is at least some accountability for what people are saying.