Finland makes our buses look crap, as well as our phones. “Every bus and tram in Helsinki and the surrounding cities of Vaanta and Espoo are being fitted with Linux servers and GPS units. Every bus and tram in the conurbation will not only become a wireless hotspot serving broadband internet throughout the vehicle — for free — but every bus and tram is visible on a Google map (the beta version is at tinyurl.com/2gftso) that uses the same real-time passenger information as the controllers in their command centre.” Hat-tip to Guy Beres.
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It’s nearly a month since I posted my tacky Heath Ledger joke page. What have we learned? Truth be told, not a lot more than I wrote in the Day 1 lessons and the items tagged “heath ledger”.
But let’s look at the total traffic anyway, this time using a graph from Google Analytics which shows visits only visitors to the jokes page.
As of just now, there’s been 11,717 page views in total, representing 8,798 unique visitors who stayed on average for 3 mins 44 secs per visit — quite respectable!
Traffic took a couple of days to peak — the first day being fuelled by Google Adwords — with a secondary peak the following week when Ledger’s funeral arrangements hit the news. Google rates the peaks as about 1000 visits a day and even now, a month later, we’re still seeing 60 to 80 visits a day.
As for the jokes themselves, well… to be honest I really don’t want to read them again. Most of them were crap. If you’ve got any astounding sociological observations, feel free to post a comment.
Amy Webb (now there’s an aptonym!) has updated her diagram of who owns the new media landscape. It’s also available as a PDF file.
Coming soon, a widget and RSS feed to help you track acquisitions and mergers in media.
I must admit, I’d much rather see this sort of data presented as a directed graph of ownership relationships, rather than simple lists — something like this diagram. The size of the nodes could represent the companies’ market capitalisation, and width of the lines the percentage ownership or something.
Still, it’s a handy-enough reference.
Hat-Tip to Lee Hopkins.
Well unless Heath Ledger is in the news again for some reason, apart from the routine news about his funeral etc, I think the steady decline seen in the traffic over the last three days will continue.
As with the Steve Irwin jokes, though, the traffic will never fade away completely. There’ll always be some level of searching for “heath ledger jokes”, and occasional surges as he enters the news.
There’s today’s graph for now. More detailed analysis and reflection later.
Given that there’s quite a bit of fluctuation in web traffic from day to day anyway — for all manner of reasons — I’m going to say that it’s been relatively steady through the week so far.
As I mentioned yesterday, the Heath Ledger jokes page is now sustaining itself on Google search results. I think I’ll do a more detailed end-of week analysis tomorrow. I just wanted to publish something about this Experiment today because I know every single reader is awaiting my every word on this important global issue.
Another day, another traffic graph for The Heath Ledger Experiment. And once more, contrary to my expectations, there’s another gentle increase in traffic.
Could this be because the Heath Ledger jokes page is now the top result when you do a Google search for “heath ledger jokes”?
Today is about other things for me, not Mr Ledger, so I’ll return to these thoughts tomorrow. But do feel free to add your own comments.
Yesterday I reported that traffic for The Heath Ledger Experiment had declined across the weekend. Today I can tell you that the decline has been reversed and we’re slightly up again. Across 6 days, we’ve seen a total of 6,407 unique human visitors to the jokes page.
I have no real explanation for this yet, and it may just be statistical noise. Still, my gut feeling is that we’re moving past the initial feeding-frenzy. Perhaps the early visitors are people who actively seek out a forum for this sort of thing, because that’s how they gain the attention they seek. Later, others stumble across the site once those early visitors have seeded it with content.
Further to my last post about The Heath Ledger Experiment, it’s interesting to note that of the Top 100 search terms which brought traffic here, 27 are Heath Ledger-related. 28 if you count “drug overdose joke”.
That compares with 33 related to Corey Worthington Delaney and 2 to Steve Irwin.
Traffic related to The Heath Ledger Experiment continues to decline across the long weekend, the exact opposite of my admittedly ill-informed speculation. From a peak of 1,970 unique human visitors daily, it’s dropped to 1,227.
However that’s still well above the typical figure of around 500 unique humans daily which prevailed before this Experiment and The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney.
Hmmm… I predicted yesterday that traffic would increase again across the weekend, but it hasn’t so far. Saturday’s traffic was actually the lowest of the four days since I started The Heath Ledger Experiment.
No theories yet. Let’s look again tomorrow and see what happens with the Sunday traffic (which will include hits from Saturday in the US, thanks to the Earth being round). A sunny Sunday isn’t right for numerical analysis.
As before, the figure for the last day only includes traffic from midnight to about 4am. And the number in the top-left corner of the graph isn’t relevant, as it’s “hits” — which includes all the pieces on a page as well as the page itself.
Website traffic is starting to decline again although, as the graph shows, yesterday’s traffic was still the second-highest this month and the decline was relatively small.
Two things this morning. One, a look back at how much time this has taken so far, in response to a less-than-polite comment from Todd and a sensible question from Crispin. Two, some speculation about how the traffic might go from here.
OK, I clearly know nothing about the Internet. Website traffic has actually gone up since yesterday!
Don’t worry about that number in the corner of the graph. That’s “hits” which includes all the images and little bits of JavaScript in each page.
Using another analysis tool, the number of unique visitors to the site each day (once search robots and hack attempts are filtered out) has risen from around 500 a day before Corey Worthington Delaney to more than 900 after Mr Socialite graced the world with his presence, to 1402 on Heath Ledger Day 1, to 1807 yesterday.
So what’s going on here?
Further to this morning’s post about The Heath Ledger Experiment, here’s a graph of my website traffic so far this month.
As you can see, traffic roughly tripled yesterday after my little game. The data for today is only for midnight to roughly 4am, so that’s why it’s so low.
The increase in traffic from 15 January is due to Corey Worthington Delaney. Most of that is to the page Corey Delaney, freedom fighter (for the right to party), even though I’m much happier with Arrest of “teen party host” highlights stupidity of law.
[Update 30 January 2008: More analysis of this has been posted since this article was written. Look for items tagged "heath ledger".]
Just 24 hours ago, actor Heath Ledger died. Before most people even knew he was dead, I’d set up a web page asking for jokes about his death and I placed an advertisement (pictured) on Google. Tasteless. But there was a porpoise. This was Science!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. If you have any questions as you read this, please ask them. I’ll be exploring the data more deeply over the next few days.
The $3.1 billion merger between Google (”the Internet’s largest search profiling company”) and DoubleClick (”the Internet’s largest targeted advertising company”) will go ahead “without conditions”. The US Federal Trade Commission says the merger is “unlikely to lessen competition”. Not quite the creation of the Googlezon as predicted in the short film Epic 2014, but there’s still time… Hat tip to EPIC Alert (no relation) via Roger Clarke.
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