Friday, March 11, 2005

MSNBC redux, or Odd traffic patterns

The other day I briefly discussed the surprisingly low amount of traffic a link at MSNBC brought here. Now that the link has been up for its third day, it is time to review this issue.

I stand by the fact that an MSNBC broadcast and link do not lead to a lot of traffic. I'm sure that there is a wide variety of reasons for this, including MSNBC's lower viewership, the disconnect that still exists between television and the web, etc, etc, so it would be unfair of me to expect this to be equivilant to an Instapundit link. I am noticing an odd pattern, though. Usually with a link from one of the major blogs, you see an immediate spike of traffic. The first day is always the biggest, and by the 4th or 5th day, you are almost back down to your normal traffic level. This MSNBC link has behaved differently. Since the Connected Coast to Coast site acts like a blog, with content sliding down the page as new content is added, you'd expect a similar pattern. Instead, on the first night when the link to 'Lullabye' was timely and pertinent, traffic was disappointingly slow. Yesterday traffic picked up, which could be considered normal given that the original link was placed on Wednesday evening. Today the traffic should have begun to slow again, but it is actually a little heavier than it was at this time yesterday.

MSNBC, you have me baffled.

2 comments:

Lowell Brown said...

I agree. I just had my first-ever "Instalanche" from an InstaPundit link and it went about the way you describe. I don't think MSNBC gets much web traffic, although it should.

Lowell Brown said...

By the way, I've added you to my blogroll.