AI.Com's $85 Million Super Bowl Ad Campaign Falls Foul as Traffic Crashes Servers
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The campaign allegedly cost $15 million for the ads, $70 million for the domain name.
AI.com bought its way onto the biggest advertising stage in the world on Sunday night, running a fourth-quarter Super Bowl ad spot that told tens of millions of sports fans worldwide to head to the site and create a handle. Hyped-up viewers arrived in droves, and then the site crashed.
Within minutes of the ad airing, users across social platforms reported that AI.com was either unreachable or stuck in failed sign-up loops, turning what was meant to be the site's big launch moment into an unexpected stress test that failed right before the eyes of millions. The company soon restored its service, but first impressions count.
In a post on X.com, co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek, best known as the CEO of Crypto.com, said that the company had "prepared for scale, but not for THIS," later attributing the disruption to external factors outside the company's control. Marszalek later wrote that the website was "hitting Google rate limits (which are at their absolute global maximum)."
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