Tag: Hate

  • Blog economics of hate

    The easiest way to draw traffic to your site all you have to do is hate on people.

    My definition of flaming content online: To bad mouth purely for the sake of creating traffic, link baiting, retweeting, Facebooking, and otherwise bad-mouthing a person, organization, company, or news item for a purely selfish reason. (Read here to see what it is like to receive these criticisms)

    Why does this work? When someone reads something that you write, they are left with a number of choices. Do nothing, comment, talk about it, share it, tweet it, email it, or bookmark it.

    Over time, you learn that people are more likely to link to or forward something that is salacious than they are something that is benign, informative, or encouraging. That’s just the nature of consuming new media. The result is that some people write purely to draw traffic and since “flaming sells” they know that flaming people/organizations will draw more notoriety, traffic, and the hope for… income.

    Here’s a formula that I’ve seen play out for the past several years.

    • Normal content = x1
    • Flaming content = x5

    That’s pretty much what it looks like. If your Twitter account, Facebook profile, or blog flames someone you’ll get more traffic. Why? People love to read rants.

    So are you saying that all blog traffic is drawn to flame speech? Not at all. And here is why:

    • Remarkable content = x10 (or more)

    Which leads to my point: Most people write hate/flame based content because they don’t have the time/guts/brains/skills to write something remarkable in the first place. In other words, it is easier for them to draw traffic with flame-worthy content than it is to draw traffic with remarkable content.

    Adam’s Law of Traffic: Write something remarkable and everyone will talk about it. Write about something you hate about someone and some people will talk about it. Write about normal stuff and only your mama will talk about it.

    Bonus math: Since mountains of people like to copy the thoughts of others… sometimes giving credit and other times not.

    Copied content + traffic = x5

  • So Long American Idol Season 8

    american-idol

    I watched most of the American Idol audition shows this year. I love the auditions! And I gave Hollywood Week a shot… and it was fun. But after last nights show, I’m out. I’ll come back in a few weeks when the quality of musicians starts to shine through. It’s one thing to have the occasional bad singing… and they had that covered last night. (The woman who went first probably killed their ratings; horrible outfit; she butchered that song. Someone please tell the 95 pound woman she can’t pull off an Aretha Franklin song, need I go on?) But I’ve seen and heard enough to know that they are merely hyping the “most talented group ever.” And the judge who is Paula’s stand-in just in case Paula falls off the wagon one more time… she was a complete Paula Abdul clone last night! What exactly did she add to the panel?

    I’ll be back for the finale. But I don’t think I can sweat it out all season with this cast.

    Then again, there isn’t a lot else on so I’ll probably just whine and watch next week. Yeah, who am I kidding? I have a love-hate relationship with the show.

    And I voted for Danny Gokey 25 times before going to bed. Man, that guy can sing.