In late October, I came across a survey on a blog called Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Appropriate for the time of year, the survey concerned horror films, and as I am a fan of this particular cinematic genre I thought it worth completing and posting to the blog despite the fact that said survey had nothing to do with sex. As I pointed out at the time, it wasn’t like every single thing we’ve ever posted concerned sex anyway.
I spent a few days working on the survey, thinking about and carefully wording each of my answers. Hey, I take my fandom seriously. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my attention shifted away from sex, but I was determined to put at least as much thought into the thirty questions as I do the typical TMI Tuesday post. Once I’d answered all the questions, formatting the post was quite labor-intensive, featuring movie posters and embedded YouTube trailers. It was the first post I wrote in the new Blogger interface, as the old interface made uploading and properly placing image files a bit problematic.
As I published the post, I knew that it was unlikely to get much in the way of comments, or even page views; after all, people come to our blog to read sexy stories and see pictures of naked people (mostly Jill). They don’t visit in the hopes of learning my opinion of The Human Centipede. In fact, my opening comments include the following:
If you don’t happen to fancy horror as a cinematic genre, I won’t take it personal if you decide to skip this entry. If you do – or if you’re willing to go along for the ride – you might get an idea as to what, beyond sexy naked women, makes me tick.
With that, I released into the ether a whimsical but introspective series of my thoughts on all things horror and Sci-Fi, from Boris Karloff to Wes Craven. I’m happy with how the post turned out, and occasionally re-read it for the purposes of marveling at my own writing. (What? I can’t be the only blogger who does this.) Rather than posting my answers in the comment section at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, as requested by the survey’s author, I instead posted a link to our own blog. I did this in part to generate a little traffic, but more than that I knew that my answers would never fit into a single comment (Blogger limits comments to 4,096 characters), and I had no desire to break my answers up into several.
It was probably December when I noticed that the post in question – which as of this writing still has but a single comment from an apparent one-time visitor – had more views than the average post. At the time, only a handful of posts, some of which were years old, had gotten more than a hundred views. The survey had crossed that threshold in, I’m guessing, just a few weeks. By the end of December, it surpassed our erotic story To Yummy on Her Birthday, which was until then our most-viewed post.
As the survey crossed 500 page views, and then 600, it occurred to me that something was amiss. How could this non-sexual post soar past erotic stories, TMI Tuesdays and HNTs to become the most-viewed item we’ve ever blogged? The only thing that made any sense whatsoever was that visitors were being directed to our blog en masse by some online horror authority. Perhaps a contributor to some prominent horror film discussion website had stumbled upon our post and extolled the awesomeness of it to the internet horror fan community at large. That would certainly explain the sudden spike in page views.
Unfortunately the stats feature on Blogger seemed to say otherwise. While we don’t have Google Analytics set up on our blog, the stats feature lists traffic sources that lead visitors to one’s blog. In other words, if someone follows a link from a particular domain to our blog, said domain will be included in the traffic sources. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual about these sources; listed were the usual sites, from Google to Twitter’s proprietary t.co domain to other blogs. Had a significant amount of this traffic come from some manner of horror website, certainly the listed traffic sources would be skewed to reflect this fact.
Out of ideas, I returned to the original post at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. I read the comments in the hopes that a clue could be found, that perhaps some fellow commenter, or even the blog’s author, had touted the excellence of my answers and had not only insisted that everyone view them immediately, but also swore to publish the link on every blog and internet forum he or she possibly could.
Turns out this was not the case; there were no references to my brilliant post anywhere in the comments. It seemed I was back to square one, literally out of ideas and more intrigued than ever as to how this post was nearing a thousand views. It currently stands at more than eleven-hundred, ironic considering the decidedly unsexy nature of the subject matter.
It was while looking at our search keywords – another Blogger stats feature enabling a blog owner to find out what terms, when plugged into a search engine, have driven visitors to his or her blog – that I finally discovered what led to this particular post’s apparent explosion in popularity.
Sorry about the crap picture. Just know that there’s a lot of Jennifer Connelly ass-to-ass in our search terms
According to the stats feature, six of the top ten search terms for our blog over the past month have in some way involved Jennifer Connelly and the 2001 Darren Aronofsky film Requiem For a Dream. If you’ve seen the film, you know that it features a scene in which Connelly and another woman share a double ended dildo.
Question #22 of the survey asked for a film that is “technically outside the horror genre” but which one “might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film”. I chose Requiem For a Dream, and described it thusly:
The film deals with addiction, obsession and insanity, and features some of the most unsettling subject matter and downright horrific imagery I’ve ever seen in a non-horror film. The prospect of watching Jennifer Connelly – Cliff Secord’s Jenny! – go ass-to-ass with another comely heroin addict may sound alluring, but the film is grueling and leaves the viewer in need of detox afterwards.
I even included a picture of the scene in question.
I’m the first to admit that I don’t have a clue how search engines work. Were someone to search for something as relatively vague as “requiem for a dream jennifer connelly” (an actual search term as seen in the picture, above), I’m guessing he or she would find pages upon pages of more relevant search results including but not limited to the film’s IMDb and Wikipedia listings, as well as a host of porn sites trying to lure desperate and gullible pervs with the promise of non-existent deleted scenes in which Connelly and her shorter-haired playmate are DPed by hung black studs before taking facials from all the spectators.
In fact, when I type this exact term into Yahoo!, I get 7,800,000 results. Our blog doesn’t turn up in the first three pages of results, and I know that if I was horny and for whatever reason looking to get off to the scene in question, I would have found multiple YouTube links in the first page alone. Actually, if I was horny and looking to get off to the scene in question, I probably wouldn’t. I would instead go to some random streaming porn site, type “double ended dildo” into the search box, and undoubtedly have a better time watching a longer scene that is likely better-lit and intended to titillate.
It seems that as one mystery is solved, another arises: How do people searching for “requiem for a dream jennifer connelly” find our blog? Hell, another current search term of ours is “penis”, and I know damn well that a search for this common word would return a zillion sites that aren’t our blog. I guess it’s best to just let that one go.
Before I go, however, in the interest of testing a hypothesis, I’m going to list a few potential search keywords: Jennifer Connelly, Requiem for a Dream, double ended dildo, ass to ass, sex, Scarlet Johansson lesbian scene, fisting, cumshot, facial, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Biel sixty-nine, Sarah Palin bukkake whore. There! That should do it.
I’ll check back in a couple weeks and see if we have a new most-viewed post.
-Jack
P.S. The original post can be found here.
This has to be the weirdest way people find your blog! However, Jennifer Connelly + sex blog is a match made in heaven. D has been in love with her tits for years.
WTF, I came here for the Scar Jo Lesbian scene! Where is it?!?!
LOL, you never can tell what post will bring people to your blog. I stumble all my own articles each time I post them. It used to be you couldn’t do that but ever since the demise of the su.pr URL shortening service Stumbleupon used to have they must have relaxed the rules. So on a blog devoted to vintage recipes which one blew up all other pageviews more than others? An old ad for Armour meats that I titled “The Man with the Hannibal Lechter Smile” I guess everyone on stumbleupon was searching hannibal lechter at that time because in 5 days it made 852 pageviews. One can never tell…
The Vintage Recipe Blog
that is weird! and where’s the Scarlett Johansson lesbian scene? :p