Pages

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

203rd post and the Robo-Stat Blasters

A few posts back I finally hit 200 actual, posted posts.  I mention this now not because I expect anyone to give a damn, but because, last year, when I ran a series of posts riffing on the my inflated post numbers as illustrated on the blogger.com dashboard, something weird happened: these posts racked up pageviews in record numbers.

These were clearly throw-away posts meant only to occupy my fatuous mind for a few moments while I tried to think of something real to write about, but all three of them* were immediately deluged with pageviews at a rate way out of proportion to anything this blog has seen before or since.  Overnight these banal little posts were racking up over a thousand pageviews.  In the 5 years this blog has been in existence, only two other posts have broken a thousand pageviews and it took many, many months--and a diligent publicity campaign by Grodog--to get there, not a single day.  

Obviously no one wants to read about how many times I've bothered posting to this silly blog, so clearly these hits must have been generated by some robo-hitmonkey in Shangai or Minsk or Cleveland.  But what is it about these silly little posts that made the robo-hitmonkey click itself into a stupor on these content-less posts-in-name-only?  Is there something intrinsically appealing about posts with titles that follow the formula "[# of Posts]th Post!"?  Was it something else about these posts that drew the attention of the voracious, stat-blasting robots?  Has anyone else encountered this bizarre phenomenon?

*One of these posts was renamed to see if changing the name would influence the hit count.  Results were inconclusive.

[EDIT: Two days later, this post has drawn a fairly reasonable 40 hits.  Apparently the formula is no longer appealing to the cyber locusts, or I missed the point entirely. 

6 comments:

  1. I had similar problems, especially with picture-heavy posts (and one about amoral players, don't know why). Those suckers ... Well, never trust your blogger-pageviews, I guess. The crux is, if you use pictures directly via URL, they basically got you. If you just link the source, they got you, too. At least I think that's how it works. Might be wrong, though.

    And if that's any comfort at all, I for one really enjoy what your writing and you should definitely keep doing what you are doing (maybe a bit more often, but that's just me being greedy ...).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, not sure about the metrics. While my views count in the tens per day, I'll occasionally see odd weird uptick of 30+ views - not sure if it is the results of several people simultaneously slacking at work, Chinese hackers infesting the web with computerized brain mites, or a sudden interest in Shovel Knight porn...

    It's apparently a thing.

    Oh and keep at it. We are all out here merrily raving in the wilderness..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the words of encouragement.

    I'm all over the Shovel Knight porn.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, you weren't kidding; Shovel Knight porn really is a thing?

    ReplyDelete