Reminds me of a story. In 2004, I started writing satirical pieces for a website called The Spoof (sorry for the shameless self promotion). The site is basically a fake online newspaper, all the “stories” are supposed to be “news”, so think The Onion, only with all content provided by amateurs with no editors. Anyway, they listed the content on RSS, which caused them to be picked up by Google/Google News, which I discovered quite by accident in searching for something online and encountering one of my own stories as the first hit. I went on the BBS there and informed everyone, and suddenly it became a contest to see who could get the highest on Google. They started to assign points, one point for each view of your story, and so I and the other writers began to put some thought into the titles of our news stories, to make sure to include keywords that would result ultimately in a high “score” for the story. The top writer spot became a competition, and I did pretty well getting myself up there.
For example, after Britney Spears got married that first time for like 55 hours and had it annulled, I wrote a story to the effect of “Britney Spears Seeks Annulment of Wild Sex Romp.” Putting Britney Spears, Annulment and sex in the same title resulted in several thousand page views. I also wrote one about how the Olsen Twins to film Porn Movie on 18th Birthday, because at that time, there was actually a website counting down to them being “legal”. But then the 2004 Super Bowl happened, and Janet Jackson had her famous “wardrobe malfunction”. So, I wrote a story “Janet Jackson Superbowl Nip Slip Proves She’s a Cyborg” (basically a reference to that piece of metal jewelry that made it look like she had a metal nipple). I knew it would be big.
But this was a little site. The proprietors, two brothers who were running it for fun, were using a very small provider, and my earlier discovery which caused everyone to do their best to get more and more page hits was causing them problems. They had gone from 10,000 page views a month when I signed up, to 60,000, and once they hit about 40,000, their hosting service was about to drop them, and they couldn’t afford to do anything new (of course I didn’t know this or I wouldn’t have posted THAT story).
Anyway, my counter topped a million hits in one day! For about 2 hours I was an internet celebrity. On the downside, it crashed the site. It caused the owners to be booted from their host. They ended up selling the site. The new owners tried to make it into a profit vehicle by putting up banner ads. They kept it for a couple years and sold it back to the original owners who now have no problems with maintaining it. I however started writing for another satirical publication later in 2004. Then after the 2004 election, I became depressed and stopped writing…until I found Q&A sites. Now I write, it’s just more “serious”.
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