The Eddie Van Halen effect

Today was the first day where my blog counter has settled back to its normal level. That could mean 20 page views a day, and it could mean 2,000. But in truth, it’s somewhere in between. And unless somebody gives me an ice cream cone when the page views reach a certain level, the number is completely meaningless. Even so, I still pay attention to it.

Roughly 48 hours ago, the number of page views for this page shot up dramatically. And the old record for “most views in a day” went by the boards in a hurry. I was originally at a loss to explain why, but blog traffic is blog traffic, right?

Looking at the search engine terms was enough to identify the issue. It turns out that Eddie Van Halen was trending on Yahoo (they lifted the idea from Twitter, most likely). People went to Yahoo, saw that Eddie Van Halen was trending, and they clicked on the images tab, which led them to this image and related post. I have to admit, it is a cool pose that Eddie is in, so I must have chosen the image well. Some people thought so, apparently.

So the above graph’s numbers for the past two weeks, which had been pretty consistent, had to shrink dramatically to accommodate the new, inflated numbers of the past two days. As the numbers settle back to their usual range, the past two large days will drift leftward on the chart, and will eventually drop off altogether. But it will be fun to see a distorted chart for the next couple of weeks.

I’ve been a Van Halen fan for several decades now, and I love the idea that I helped to provide people with an image–one which I had cribbed from another web site–of the greatest guitar player I’ve ever seen perform live. Now that people have moved on to other things, and Eddie Van Halen isn’t trending anymore, the numbers again look like they normally do. But it was fun while it lasted.