Who’d have thought? An obituary for Heath Ledger in Middle English! Well, for a character he played. Doffing the hat to Quatrefoil, who writes, “Whoever writes this blog is frequently side-splittingly funny, but he or she can write (and knows their Middle English passing well). I am filled with wonder and envy.”
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Thank you, Richard, but no. This article in The Onion is not about me. Close though, eh?
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.
Maybe it was the phase of the Moon yesterday, but two different people were unhappy with discussions here and launched personal attacks. Google says I’m not the first to coin the term recreational outrage, but it’s certainly a perfect description.
If you read my every word — and I know you do, Gentle Reader — you’ll remember that my compulsory 9/11 post from 2006 mentioned “recreational grief”, a term I picked up from Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying:
The degree of public mourning following the deaths of Lady Diana and John F Kennedy Jr led social observers to wonder if grief is an ever-present latent feeling just waiting to be exploited by the political elite, if people’s lives are so empty that they engage in recreational grief… Perhaps individuals are emotive puppets manipulated by the mass media and/or political elite, and people cry because they are shown other people crying for a celebrity.
Perhaps outrage is also an ever-present latent feeling. If people’s lives are so comfortable that there’s nothing serious to get angry about, they’ll find somewhere to vent their outrage — going to considerable effort to find it.
Yesterday’s incidents could well illustrate this.
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.
“Heath Ledger is notable for being two things at the moment. They are: 1. Not gay. 2. Dead,” notes Eric TF Bat. “This hasn’t stopped our good friends at the Westboro Baptist ‘Church’ announcing plans to picket his memorial because he played a gay cowboy in some movie a while back.” Eric’s rant says what needs to be said.
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.
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