Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Topgear: the show that sent Grindr popularity
into the stratosphere (really)



Recently, Pinknews interviewed Grindr CEO and founder Joel Simkhai on the occasion of the second anniversary of the gay smartphone "dating" application that has been downloaded 1.65 million times and is growing by 100,000 downloads per month.
“After that we started going to all the Pride marches and using guerrilla marketing. Come June we were in San Francisco when someone came and told me Stephen Fry had just mentioned Grindr on a TV show called Top Gear.”
     Britain’s most famous technophile did more than just mention Grindr on Top Gear: he hijacked the BBC motoring programme, with an estimated global audience of 350 million viewers, for a minute and a half as he explained Grindr’s intricacies to host Jeremy Clarkson and tried to find another Grindr user in the studio audience.
     “The impact was instant,” says Joel. “We had about 10,000 downloads overnight, increasing our base by 50 per cent. Within a week we were up to 40,000. Someone once asked me if we paid Stephen Fry to mention us, but we didn’t. Apparently one of the guys he works with is gay and showed it to him the week of his appearance.”
Here's a great Topgear pastiche with a Julie Brown soundtrack:

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