Weeping angels and taint weeks: behind Offbeat Home & Life’s highest traffic spike ever

weeping angel tutorial

While y’all were off enjoying your long holiday weekends, Offbeat Home & Life was busy having its highest week of traffic EVER. Forget fucking basil, you guys… Offbeat Home & Life’s traffic spike was all about making Weeping Angels out of hacked up Barbies — EXCUSE ME, BARBIE-LIKE DOLLS. (Several Barbie collectors in the comments wanted to make sure we clarified that issue.)

Here’s how the spike stacked up with Offbeat Home & Life’s traffic patterns:

Offbeat Home's weekly traffic since launch
Offbeat Home’s weekly traffic since launch

The post got shared all over the place, mostly on Facebook (including David Tennant’s fan page, with its 2.2 million followers), but also Reddit, Metafilter, Hackaday, and many others.

Needless to say, Sherry (the author of the post) was STOKED:

Hi, I wanted to thank you for plugging The Stitchkateer at the bottom of the tutorial you published on turning Barbies to Weeping Angels. The story seems to have been wildly popular as I’m getting requests for interviews and such from it!

I know you didn’t have to plug my shop with my article, I know that was your choice and I just wanted to let you know how deeply grateful I am that you did!

Thank You Very Much!
Sherry Loveland (Anthropolywog)
The Stitchkateer

This isn’t the first time we’ve hit a massive viral post over a holiday — remember taint week? Sure, there are fewer people online during a holiday week. Publishers know this and so most of us don’t waste good content on a low-traffic week.

Here at the Offbeat Empire, however, we’ve learned that a slow news week can be awesome… it’s slim pickins out there in nerdland. Offbeat Home & Life’s managing editor Megan knows that while there are fewer of us online, there’s even less interesting stuff to read. If we can time a lightweight but FUCKING AWESOME post with viral potential to fill that gap? Don’t blink… SPIKE!