The Oprah tsunami hits my blog

The Oprah tsunami hits my blog

Looked at my traffic logs a couple days ago…

Who died and left me all their traffic? It’s not like I blogged on Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova or anything lately. Did I?

Oh … wait … It’s gotta be Berry.

Since I blogged about Justin Berry (the former “camwhore,” now believer, now States’ witness, now media sensation) a while ago (here and here), I already had pretty good search rankings for my post, and it’s been a steady, popular page. But yesterday our local Chicagoland media-mogul diva Oprah Winfrey blew the roof off my blog just by inviting two guests on her show, Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald—the reporter who outted him, saved him, and now “handles” him.

Look at the graphic at the right. This insane Mt. Everest of traffic spikes is entirely due to increased visitor traffic via Google from searchers looking for “justin berry” or “justin berry porn,” or “Justin Berry cam pics,” and so on. Everyone’s landing on that first, old post, and there’ve been a flurry of new comments. Some gushing with excitedness to the point of typographic cardiac arrest, and others targeting Berry with distrust and cynicism.

I knew Oprah had become a major force in the book publishing world with her Book Club picks (see “The Oprah Effect: Version 3.0” and “The Oprah effect: two scholars independently assess the book club that changed everything”), but I had no idea there was this tidal wave of web traffic that splashed about with her every move.

So, apart from blogging about popular hotties, is this one more blog traffic-building strategy? Blog Oprah’s attention-space? Watch her website for upcoming shows and get the search engine rankings as quickly as possible?

Sure, the traffic is transient and lemming-like, but it’s just like surfing a tsunami. Web tsurfing. Oprah style.

Wild.

[tags]blog-promotion, blog-traffic, BlogRodent, Justin-Berry, Oprah, Oprah-Winfrey, Pentecostal[/tags]

4 thoughts on “The Oprah tsunami hits my blog

  1. Pingback: my-ad-sense.com

  2. Rich Post author

    Ha, I wondered exactly that this morning on my way to work.

    On Feb 14 I earned enough money from Google to buy a McChicken sandwich and a small diet Coke. That’s it. I’ll link to a graph of the income this month just to demonstrate.

    Google adwords is definitely an exercise in incremental growth.

    Rich.
    BlogRodent

  3. Steve May

    “Blog Oprah’s attention-space? Watch her website for upcoming shows and get the search engine rankings as quickly as possible?”

    You may be on to something there, Rich.

  4. Rich Post author

    Hey, Steve.

    Yeah, I think it might work. But I wonder if there are other factors in the rapidly fading traffic spike I experienced. First, this is a “sexy” subject–literally. It involves sex, simulated sex, solo sex, and illegal sex. Sex is all over the place. Second, it has a pretty face. Hollow-eyed, yes, but still a pretty face, and vulnerable to boot–so, Oprah’s female audience would be struck by the story based on that, alone. Also, it’s a criminal story. America loves crime. The bloodier, the better. Finally, the subject matter is Web-related–and while Oprah and the Web don’t really intersect much, she may have inadvertently “broke through” to a larger Web audience just because she did this story.

    Still, I wonder if it would work, as an experiment?

    On the other hand, it can’t be much fun surfing in the wake of a media whale.

    Rich.
    BlogRodent

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