The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sex, Jokes and Politics: Why $15 Million Won’t Buy Traffic Like Ace of Spades

Posted on | May 26, 2011 | 22 Comments

“All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe — it’s a safety valve to make sure we don’t become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.”
— Rule 5(b), “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year,” Feb. 15, 2009

Soros-funded Media Matters for America has 90 employees and an annual budget of $15 million, and gets about 650,000 “unique visitors” per month. The annual budget at Ace of Spades HQ is unknown, and its “employees” are just a bunch of part-time goofs, but they get about 3 million hits per month.

Tuesday afternoon, I got a sample of the awesome power of Ace’s traffic when he linked my post about Christina Hendricks, temporarily overloading the servers and producing about 5,000 visits in the span of three hours. What would traffic have been like, if the servers hadn’t overloaded? Dunno. But that surge was as impressive as Christina Hendricks’s cleavage an Instalanche.

Why is Ace’s traffic so awesome? He explains:

Very often I get criticized for running funny or trivial stories, or going off-message. There is a contingent of folks who want their political sites doing nothing but relentlessly messaging. . . .
They seem to make the error of not realizing that for a message to be effective, first, it must be read in the first place.
And being a little idiosyncratic and random and funny and goofy helps with that. Whether the Seriousness Brigade realizes that or not. . . .

You should read the whole thing, if you want to understand why all-politics-all-the-time unnecessarily limits readership.

It’s interesting to note that Rush Limbaugh gets the same kind of complaints that Ace gets. Every time Rush talks about golf or the NFL, some listeners call in and demand that he “stick to the issues.”

Absolutely. “Stick to the issues”! Because I know you’d rather read about Tim Pawlenty’s ethanol policy than to see a buxom young blonde in lingerie, right?

Or maybe I was wrong. Either way, you should hit my tip jar. Because Media Matters has $15 million and I don’t. Social justice, man . . .

Category: Ace of Spades, How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog, Rule 5

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