An Experiment about Page Views

A couple of days ago Rich Reynolds over at the UFO Conjectures blog put up a brief article that has something to do with Roswell. Apparently some of his readers took issue with his return to Roswell and made comment on it. Reynolds said that each mention of Roswell boosted the page views of the blog and he provided a screen shot to prove his point. There was a spike on it. And in the comments section, there was a post by Gilles Fernandez remarking that he had just posted to his website a rebuttal of one of Jaime Maussan’s expert’s latest comments on the Roswell Slides.

I thought I would perform an experiment about this and because, as Gilles had mentioned, Jaime Maussan had released another “expert’s” opinion of the image on the Roswell Slides, this was a timely story. I believed that the issue had been settled about forty-eight hours after the Mexico City disaster and while some of those original participants in the slides fiasco were reluctant to let go, it was clear to the vast majority of people that the image was not an alien. To prove that it was, Maussan published another opinion on why it was alien. All this, I thought, would be a good target for the experiment.

I posted a short article about the Roswell Slides and within minutes had the first response to it. There was an immediate spike in the page views, and oddly, a dip and then another spike and twelve hours later an even larger spike. Clearly the Roswell name brought in page views. Just add Roswell to the title and people came to see if there was anything new.

Last year, as the run up to the Great Reveal was a major topic, this blog was averaging more than three times the normal page views that I see today… and Roswell is an on-going topic that peaks the interest of those out there who visit blogs like this one. (But then, so did the articles on Oak Island which doubled the daily average.)

All this really proved was that Reynolds’ observation was accurate and you can pull people to your blog by mentioning Roswell. That some still believe that the Roswell Slides show an alien gives you a feeling for the state of UFO research. That others attempt to hijack the Slides, dragging in other nutty ideas isn’t all that surprising either.

In any case, the experiment revealed the high interest in Roswell and provides us with a clue as to how to drive traffic to a blog, if that is the only mission of a blog. Just stick Roswell in the title and they will come.