Gooey butter cake, swimsuit models and most-read headlines
So what’s up with the Swimsuit Model of the day?
It showed up today at the top the list of “Yesterday’s most read stories”.
Truth in advertising … it wasn’t our most read story. The formula that we use for measuring our “most read stories” doesn’t count blog posts, or forums, or slideshows or videos. When you count all of those, swimsuit models weren’t even in our Top 10.
However, when it comes to stories created in our content management system (called CMS) … swimsuit models was right there at No. 1.
So, how did that happen, and why did we suddenly start running a feature showing scantily-clad swimsuit models?
We’ve been running the swimsuit models on the site since February. It was part of a service provided by 3rd-party content provider TinBu. They’ve also provided us with a gossip page, local gas prices, lottery, horoscope, recipes, soccer standings, Sudoku and airport flight tracking information. We didn’t have to run any of these features, but looked at them all as additional content, at no extra charge, that some customers might like. The swimsuit feature can be racy on some days, but it’s no racier than the ads you might see on one of the pages of your newspaper. In some ways it’s like the betting line or horoscopes that have long been part of newspaper tradition — we don’t embrace them as a core part of the coverage, but we know that different content has different audiences.
For 9 months or so, the swimsuit models page didn’t create much traffic — generating only a couple hundred page views on its biggest days.
Last Wednesday, we linked to the airport flight tracker on the home page so that readers could check the status of their holiday flights. At the top of the flight tracker was a link to the swimsuit model page. Maybe it was a combination of cold weather and holiday time off, but for the first time, swimsuit models cracked the list of most-read stories.
Now, it’s likely to show up for several more days, as our list of most-read headlines on the home page becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This has happened to us before. When a recipe for St. Louis gooey-butter cake showed up on our list of most-emailed stories, it remained on the list for weeks.
So whether it’s swimsuit models or gooey-butter cake, you can never be certain where your next click will come from.
Why not swimsuit models slathered in gooey butter cake, reading the daily horoscope while playing Sudoku?
Your readership will skyrocket if you have pictures of swimsuit models wrestling in gooey butter cake.
–What can possibly be more telling of the gravity of the ‘Editor’s Desk’, than a “story” about swimsuit models and gooey-butter cakes?
–I guess their priorities are in areas that border on inanities, rather than on real issues. Revealing…
is the whole swimsuit models thing really just a trap to draw people in and then once they click on it, you contact their bosses and tell them they’ve been looking at scantily clad ladies? are you going to look at my IP address now and try to get me in trouble for writing this comment?
You all thought you would have learned your lesson the last time you posted a stupid topic that begged for childish responses. Swimsuit models? Please, for the love of God, go do some reporting.
What do swimsuit models have to do with news? So you’re getting increased pageviews right now, but it’s going to be at the expense of your core repeat visitors who are going to drop you in favor of a real news site. Face it, midsize newspapers like the PD are dead. The print survivors are going to be the big ones like NYTimes, WaPo, USAToday, and hyperlocal neighborhood news.
All you’re really telling us is that your paper lacked class since February and it’s nothing new.
Does anyone at your paper know anything about journalism any more? Or are you downgrading to a shopper?
Cnn.com also has a swimsuit model channel inside their sports section, which is provided by Sports Illustrated ( SI.com ). It’s actually integrated into their navigation bar. If it’s content good enough for CNN.com, it is probably good enough for many other news related sites inside of their sports sections, for example.