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 ...).

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  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..

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  3. Thanks for the words of encouragement.

    I'm all over the Shovel Knight porn.

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

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