Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Flood That Never Happened

Sen. John McCain spoke to the National Rifle Association in Louisville last Friday, and the reaction seemed mixed.

If you click on the word "reaction," you'll see Paul Helmke is linking to The War on Guns.

"Neat," I thought. I'd wondered why "Handgun Control" was lurking here yesterday morning. But having this appear on both the Brady Blog and especially The Huffington Post ought to really drive some traffic my way, and that never hurts.

And then a funny thing happened. Nothing.

I noticed the link under the word "mixed" went to Snowflakes in Hell, so I emailed Sebastian:

I'm sure you've noticed by now we've both been linked to by Helmke's Brady blog/HuffPo.

Thing is, I'm getting zero hits from them in the past few hours, a couple max all day, and it's been up for a while.

Conversely, the few times I've gotten links from InstaPundit, it was like someone put a solid rocket booster on my site meter, generating 3 to 4 times normal visitors.

If the same thing is happening with you, I think we can legitimately extrapolate that they may not be as influential as they make themselves appear to be--from their comments, pro-gunners are their biggest audience. I'm not surprised by that conclusion, but I am a bit surprised at how little of an impact this has had on traffic--I would have thought it would at least result in several dozen if not hundreds of extra visits. I got nothin'.

Just thinking out loud. I'll probably say something about it tomorrow.
He indicated he had noticed the same thing and was collecting metrics.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

You should have one hit by now, but that was just me. I visit the Brady site daily.

David Codrea said...

Yeah, it was from 84 visits back--from Oregon...the only one from Brady, still waiting for HuffPo after like 3 visits total yesterday that I noticed.

Anonymous said...

Yep, that's me. If you really want to make the Brady Bunch crazy, find a way to get your link posted on...http://cheddarvision.tv/

This website is live streaming video of chedder cheese aging.

I hear it's quite popular and has an international following.

Then compare the hits you get from there to the Bradys.

Skullz said...

Can you track reverse click throughs? I think your (and Sebastian's) blog is generating some traffic for HuffPo :-)

In any case, I read this on the HuffPo article...
Instead, other than closing the gun show loophole, all he proposes is 'self-reliance.' Is that all he can suggest to communities facing more and more gun violence?

Self-reliance - two words, hyphenated that strike fear into the shriveled liberal heart and make AGs cower like a child - and they freely admit it by making the term read like it's a bad thing!

Anonymous said...

Being one of the people who have a HuffPo account and who regularly check up on Messrs. Helmke's, Sugarman's, Schoenke's, and Horwitz's antics, I can tell you that the comments sections of their blog posts are almost a 2A revival meeting, such that between Thirdpower, Melodyl, Molonlabe (and ebalnolom (backwards) solitude (and also spelled backwards) and some others (apologies for blanking on your screen names!) b!tchslapping them with facts that I can amuse myself with snarky commentary.
Jadegold has resurfaced there, as well as a woman calling herself 'shedances', who seems to have disappeared over the last several weeks, and perhaps two others are the Only Ones (Hmm, sounds catchy, David; perhaps you can use that term for something (heh)) who keep bleating the disarmament position.
From my obviously unscientific observation, I would venture that, including the authors themselves, there are perhaps 10 people total over at HuffPo that espouse the anti-gun position (comments and postings combined). And since Paul and Josh's posts generate several hundred comments apiece, you can get an idea of the proportion of pro- vs. anti-gun response.
And considering that about half of my postings never see the light of day, you should not be the least bit surprised that you haven't gotten any extra traffic.

Anonymous said...

It seems like the man behind the curtain really is being flushed out. The enemy is a tiny, tiny minority whose power is totally illusory. The enemy excels at just one thing: manipulating the perceptions of the masses to create the illusion of their own power. They remain in power only to the extent of our voluntary submission.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like anti-gun politicians also weigh the 5% of constituent messages for gun control and the 95% against and say "Eh. Whatever."