This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss how people find our articles, Nutella as thermal paste, and putting together the puzzle pieces.
EMANUEL: How do people find articles on the internet?
It’s one of those questions that I think is easy to answer but having the answer doesn’t really help. We don’t have traffic goals here at 404 Media, but they used to be a very big part of my life at VICE, where I spent most of the day with one eye looking at Chartbeat, which is software that tracks traffic in real-time. I still look at traffic a lot because it’s very interesting to me to see what people read, and just as importantly, where they’re coming from.
The big buckets are social media, Google, news aggregators, and “direct,” which mostly means a different news site cited and linked to our reporting. We still get traffic from all of these, but for reasons that have been covered many times, all these sources for traffic are decaying. Twitter is toxic and real links are drowned out by pussies in bio. Facebook is the land of the walking dead. Google is boosting AI that tells people to eat glue.