Several bloggers have noticed in the last week or two that their traffic has spiked dramatically, and this blog is no exception; for some reason I’ve been getting double my normal hit count for the past ten days or so.
This phenomenon has been attributed both to the Nick Berg tragedy (by Sullivan) and to a combination of that and the Abu Ghraib scandal. But while that’s undoubtedly part of it, I’m not convinced it’s the only reason- after all, there was no similar blog traffic spike that I heard about from, say, the Pat Tillman death, or any of the other major war-related stories of the past few months. And the last time people spent this much time looking online for an mpeg it was the PHST, but I don’t remember that doubling the traffic of Gawker or TMFTML.
This isn’t to minimize the tragedy of Berg’s death, of course; clearly, a lot of people are scouring the Internet for information, the actual video footage, etc. But are these people who weren’t on the Internet/reading blogs before? I’m not convinced.
My huge traffic jump has come mostly from an influx of Google hits, but most of them haven’t had anything to do with Berg. I’m thinking something more technical is at work- might Sitemeter have done something to adjust their accounting methods? Did Google change something (the week of their IPO?) It seems like a lot of stuff in my archive that didn’t used to show up in searches now does. Or might the recent Blogger upgrade have something to do with it?
Speaking of Andrew, as I mentioned he’s doing a book signing at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble (on 22nd and 6th) Monday night at 7. I’d like to get some bloggers together to go; e-mail me if you’re interested.
Posted by Stephen Silver at May 14, 2004 02:13 PMMy increased hits have been due to people searching for a certain female army Private. Today, they've been looking for pictures of her.
Posted by: Bill McCabe at May 14, 2004 02:34 PMMy hit count increased by more than an order of magnitude. All of it was due to searches retrieving posts of mine related to Nick Berg that were indexed in several different major search engines. It was pretty macabre seeing all the reports of "Nick Berg decapitation" and "Iraqi execution" in my stats. A good number of the searches, however, were merely for "Nick Berg", which suggests that many people were simply interested in Berg and what led him to Iraq.
Posted by: John-Paul Pagano at May 17, 2004 01:11 AMI'm still being overwhelmed by Google hits of people looking for Frances Bean Cobain. So there you have it.
Posted by: red at May 17, 2004 10:31 AM