From late 2003 to early 2005, I did this ALL the time on a website called The Spoof. A link to my profile with many of my stories can be found here. My best headline ever (or at least most popular) came the day after Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”. I saw a still picture of the offending nipple, and knowing it was a rather popular topic in the news and on the internet, I seized what I thought would be a good opportunity. This site was subscribed to RSS, meaning that the stories were carried on Google News, as if they were genuine news stories (something I had myself discovered a few months earlier and reported to the community).
I began to utilize this bit of knowledge to dominate the “leader board” (each week, the site would rank the top writers based on number of page views). I would do so by attempting to create headlines that were both germane to my story content and which would be likely to generate hits. For example (and remember, this was 2004, at which time there was an actual “countdown clock” on the internet in expectation of this event), I wrote “Olsen Twins to Film Porn Movie on 18th Birthday.” It was my most popular story to date, generating several hundred hits a week, keeping me not only on the leader board but at the top for several weeks running. Several others caught on, and it became a contest of sorts to see who could draw in the most unsuspecting readers.
So, back to Janet Jackson….I had heard about this, but not having watched the Super Bowl myself, I did not see it, so I searched for a picture (I am a guy after all). I was more surprised by the sun shaped metal decoration she had circling her nipple, and the fact that not once in the million times I’d heard about it, had anyone mentioned this piece of “jewelry”. Knowing that this was a hot topic with a limited shelf life, I thought I should strike before anyone else did, and even though I knew my news story title would need to include “Janet Jackson” “Super Bowl” and “nip slip”, in this case, it was a matter of the cart leading the horse, the title had come before the story. Pondering what to write about, I thought the piece of jewelry was an interesting angle that would stand out a bit.
So, the story I wrote, which if you browse around my link for a while I’m sure you will find was “Janet Jackson Super Bowl Nip Slip Reveals She’s a Cyborg.” Far from the best story I’d ever written I was QUITE pleased with the title, and quite curious to see the reader count. Within 20 minutes, the story had nearly overtaken my Olsen Twins story, which had been on the site for some time and within an hour it had gotten more hits than pretty much every story I’d written combined. Well, after I stopped monitoring the story, went on and did a few things and came back to see how things had gone, I logged onto the site, only to find an apologetic page from the owner stating that he site had been taken down, because they had anticipated over the first few months of the site’s existence, a site that would get maybe 10,000 page views per month, and recent trends (which I realized I had started), were pushing the page views upwards of 40k a month, which was causing some irritation with the company who provided their bandwidth and storage. Whereas the peak month to that point had generated 45,000 page views, in the matter of 2 hours, one story had generated over 1 million page views, at which point they were booted from their host and had to scramble to get the site back up. After about 3 days, the site came back up under new ownership, 40,000 of my page views were restored, and I became notorious.
Eventually, I decided to come here and express my opinions in a less subtle format than satire, and the rest is history.
So, yeah, I can do that.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
