Moderately interesting observation about human interest...

[JohnnyH]

So I track visits to my novel's web site - and I collect stats like the first page people hit when they visit the site. The last few days I've had this HUGE spike in the number of people entering from the Galleries page. In specific, I noticed that they all came from one picture in particular.

Then I looked at which picture. It was of me feeding an eagle ray at the Maui Ocean Center. Oh...

I find it amazing how something like the recent story of an eagle ray hitting a woman in a boat can cause a dramatic increase in the number of hits to my site simply because I had "eagle ray" in a photo's caption. Digging further I found that the picture shows up on the seventh page of the image tab of a Google search for "Eagle Ray".

I guess people are trying to look into what this flying creature from hell looks like so they know when to scream when they see one.

sigh

That's not the kind of marketing I was looking for...

John

[drbill]

I had the same thing happen after the Irwin incident. I got a lot of hits on my round stingray web page that boosted my web stats significantly.