Traffic Trends: Negativity = More Traffic? Posted on 2009-02-18 by Dave Fowler
Almost two years ago on a cranky afternoon I wrote this uninformed and poorly edited article: Xcode Editor Kinda sux.
Since that day it has consistently been the top daily hit on my blog. I did some Googlein' and discovered that it is the top link (maybe just in my search context) when searching for "xcode editor".
This probably makes the team who works on the editor unpleased... Sorry gu
ys. Let me know if you've made short cuts for that yet and I'll write an update.
I looked at my stats and found this:
1,330
1,215
925
Once you're done laughing at my piddly traffic you may notice that my top 2 blog highly trafficked blog posts of all time were also the most negatively critical. The 3rd link isn't negative by nature, but does have a negative title. I will chalk that one up as a fluke as most of its traffic came from a single day that it was on Hacker News.
I'm personally quite proud that in my few years of blogging the crankiest opinion based things I've written about are those top two posts. But, perhaps I would be more proud of greater traffic had I been less reserved.
My blog is a small sampleset. Has anyone noticed similar trends?