Kindle Receives Oprah Effect

When Oprah endorsed the Amazon Kindle portable eBook reader last week, everyone knew that would give it a boost—with one unaffiliated PR person off the record saying “well, looks like Amazon’s PR department can now take the rest of the year off.”

Turns out that person may have been right. Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that after the endorsement, search traffic for the world “Kindle” went up 479 percent, according to the numbers from Google Insights. Plus, Amazon’s own traffic went up 6 percent, traffic from Oprah.com to Amazon.com increased 15,458 percent, and 80 percent of all blog posts mentioning the Kindle on October 23rd mentioned Oprah as well.

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