Captain Caucasian And Angelina Jolie Have Hemorrhagic Fever
Published October 10, 2008 journalism , mediaTags: Goldman Sachs, Google, Google Trends, Search
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Captain Caucasian. Angelina Jolie Breast feeding on the cover of W. A mystery illness in South Africa calledhemorrhagic fever. James T. Harris.
What am I doing? I'm trying to game Google, of course. I should probably mention Barclays, Goldman Sachs and AIG as well, but I don't know if they'd really help me. Those names don't appear on Google Trends, which is a site Google created to allow people to track what search terms are most popular and what search terms are growing each day. The four non-sequitars above were the top four "hot" topics on Google Trends when I sat down to write this.
I threw their names at the top of my story and in my headline because I was hoping they'd provide a traffic-trap leading wayward web searchers to my blog. I'm also saving this post as I go along, rather than waiting until it's finished to post. Why? Because those hot trends could fall out of favor by the time I'm done with this thing and then what good are they? Of course, a natural follow up to that question: Even if they do bring me page views, what good are those page views anyway?
I've often thought that getting people to visit my website under any auspice is similar to trying to get the attention of a girl I have a crush on. "I may not be the best looking person," I'd think, "but if only she spent 10 minutes with me, Iknow she'd fall in love." Likewise, I may not have a bunch of readers, but if only people would read one or two of my posts, they'd know how smart and witty I am. Well, I don't actually feel that way, and I don't expect anyone else to feel that way after reading most of the stuff on this blog.
However.
Most news organizations do feel this way now. Google–and I suppose indirectly, the public–drive the news cycle in a vicious way. Many news organizations want people to enter their site through Google, which is the side door. From there they hopefully go through the front door to see what else is on the site. And if it's good enough, hopefully the wayward soul who landed at the site will come back for more in the future. The next time, they'll use the front door.
Depending on who is reading this, you might be saying, duh–so what? or you might be saying, really? If you are in the latter camp, you're in trouble, because it appears as though this Google gaming is the future of news. First thing in the morning many bloggers look at Google Trends and try to figure out how to capture a slice of the action, because without a brand name, the quickest way to build their company is through Google's crumbs.
For those saying, so what? I agree. Let's game the system for all it's worth and get page views. Maybe someone will get to know us and fall in love.
In case you're still reading this–and kudos to you, if you are, don't you think I desperately need an editor?–you'll be happy to know, I've already had 35 48 people click on this post, probably driven by my subject line. That almost matches blows away the highest amount of page views I had for the week, which was 38.