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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:
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.
How I engineered a viral post
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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!
I saw the content of this post pop up repeatedly in my feedly explorer, but never your post, always a rehashed version – glad that you got a traffic spike too, not just trackbacks from other people reposting the photos
Aww, you said Trackback! You must have been blogging in the mid-’00s when we were all sure that Trackbacks would save us all.
‘Cuz yeah: rehashing is what fuels most of the internet these days. Buzzfeed is essentially repackaging the entire web as a series of listicles recycling other people’s content. It made me angry for years, but now I’m just like, meh: we work to ensure the Offbeat Empire is as good as we can be about attribution (and we still make mistakes and bad decisions too!), and just let the rehashers keep trying to catch up.
I saw the Weeping Angels post get shared by several bookseller Facebook pages I’m part of, and I was so thrilled. It was like a trifecta of nerdy awesomeness: Doctor Who meeting bookselling meeting Offbeat Home and Life! Be still my heart!
Yeah, it is always cool when I see Offbeat Empire posts come across my Facebook feed via my friends. Pretty sure this one showed up a couple of times.
Reading your article helped me a lot and I agree with you. But I still have some doubts, can you clarify for me? I’ll keep an eye out for your answers.