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 One of the things that most bothers the Dowbrigade about this
blogging business is the seeming lack of correlation between the time and
effort we put into a posting and the number of people who read it.
Regularly, some bizarre story catches our eye in a spare moment
between errands and classes, and we add a sentence or two of wry commentary
and a tangentially related photo ripped from Google image search and
slap it up on the Dowbrigade as we run out the door. When we next get
to a computer a few hours later we check and see - it has been read 5,000
times!
And then when we sweat blood on a heartfelt missive,
doing multiple rewrites, tossing and turning at night to think of the
perfect turn of phrase,
polish and pare the prose, what happens? We usually get a total of about
a dozen reads.
Case in point: the two postings we ran up the flagpole
this afternoon.
The
first, a brilliant analysis of the catastrophic failure of big media
to hold up its end of the American Compact, has been read a grand total
of 39 times. The other, posted a couple of hours later and titled
"Slayer Pants onto Phone," a quickie about a woman who taught her German
shepard to call 911, has 465 reads!
Sometimes the difference is even more marked. Our all-time most
popular posting, a single paragraph form a New York Times story about an eating
contest, has been read over 50,000 times. Most of our favorite
postings never break 100.
Of course, those 100 readers are the discerning few,
the regular commentor’s and fellow travelers. The rest are carpetbaggers
who probably found the
Dowbrigade by Googling "Boobs". Rationalization number two is that if
a silly post draws 5,000 thrill seekers, and just 1% stick around to
read another posting, that is 50 new readers.
One of our savvy confidants tells us the keys are the
headline and the picture. So as way of a sort of experiment, we
have decided to pack this posting with as many hot buzzwords in the title
as possible. If
this friend’s theory is correct, we should get an avalanche of hits. Let
the flow begin….
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