Making Sense of Incomprehensibility

Sometimes I wonder just how traffic flows on the internet.

Oh, not the technical version, mind you, because at one point I could tell you precisely how networking via TCP-IP actually worked*, but I meant in terms of why traffic flows to a specific location.

If you know the name of this character that Peter
Falk is playing, you might want to go schedule
a colonoscopy. From Tenor.com.

I keep up with the Meme Monday posts for a couple of reasons, namely to push myself into posting more often by having a regular column and having an outlet for my snarky sense of humor. However, another reason to post Meme Mondays is that --by and large-- more eyeballs look at those posts than any of my other ramblings on this blog. That shouldn't be a surprise since those posts have the broadest appeal as opposed to the gamer-geek centric fare typically found on the blog.

Still, I can be surprised by what takes off and what doesn't.

When a post takes off within gamer space, that's typically driven by eyeballs on a post itself. What I mean is that traffic goes directly to that post because it got a bump from somewhere out there in the blogosphere, such as the times when a post from PC would get a mention on the now-defunct WoW Insider. The first time that happened, on the series of posts I made comparing Blood Elves and Draenei back in December 2011, caught me by surprise. All I knew at first was that our traffic had spiked from a dozen or so views to 2000 or more, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. It was only after I dug into the data that I realized almost all of the traffic was coming from WoW Insider, whereupon following it back I discovered we'd gotten a mention in their weekly blog spotlight column. The traffic eventually reverted back to normal levels, but for a week or so PC got a nice boost.

This sort of behavior has happened from time to time, based primarily upon getting a mention in other blogs or websites with readership far greater than our own, but it could also be due to pertinent data appearing in a post. Such as Souldat's post on How to Effectively Tank the Lich King from 2010, which remains our single most viewed post on the blog. It didn't get a spike in viewership, but it had a steady number of views for several years. That it used to get on the main page of Google Search results didn't hurt.**

That being said, by and large the majority of spiky traffic that does come to the blog goes to the blog's main page rather than a specific post, which tells me that that traffic isn't driven by the gamer geek ecosphere.

Here ya go; the last three months' worth of traffic.

While I can guess what might have driven some traffic --the spike at the end is likely due to the magic words "Discworld" and "Kickstarter"-- a lot of those spikes come from way out of nowhere. I can't assume that a single post drove traffic to the blog, because the spikes in July, September and October show up during my "dead time" between posts. Blaugust is also no help, since you can't look at an individual post and say "yeah, that's brought people here". There's also the undercurrent of web crawlers and whatnot that will flow through all of your website creating a higher base level than what I'd call the true number of regular readers.

***

I've always known that the internet is a fickle beast, but blogging over the past decade and a half has reinforced those opinions. I still laugh at people --typically business types and marketers-- who think that "making something go viral" is just what internet creators do. "We need you to create a viral video for this" is a query I've heard on occasion***, as if you can snap your fingers and views will magically appear, but it's the sense that some people who "get" the internet and can manipulate it to their own ends that drives me batty. 

The internet doesn't work like that; what goes viral and what doesn't is pretty much an unknown. So I'll just continue to wonder just what the hell it is that occasionally makes PC's viewership spike.

*If you gave me an hour or two I could refresh my memory on all of the details beyond the basics of hubs, routers, setting up a local LAN behind a firewall, etc.

**In case you're wondering, the advent of Wrath Classic and the opening of Icecrown Citadel did not result in a corresponding spike in views. I presume everybody ran to Wowhead to find out what the currently accepted strat is for the Lich King fight. Since I never actually got to raid ICC, I couldn't tell you whether the current meta matches what Soul had written down over a decade ago.

***Never directed at me, thankfully.