According to Reuters.com, these are the Top Ten Most Read Stories of 2006. I'm not joking:
1. Bush chides father for election remarks
2. Iran's Hizbollah says ready to attack US, Israel
3. IKEA billionaire founder proud to be frugal at 80
4. Miss Puerto Rico crowned Miss Universe, collapses
5. CBS chief says regrets unceremonious Rather exit
6. Southern San Andreas fault waiting to explode: report
7. Chavez vows to beat the 'devil'
8. Death-row prisoner gets pregnant in solitary
9. American radio hangs up on Madonna
10. Mel campaigns for new movie, against war in Iraq
Was a piece on the founder of IKEA really the Third Most Read Story on Reuters.com in 2006? Did more people really read about Miss Puerto Rico getting the vapors than about Hugo Chavez's pissing match with George Bush?
On the positive side of the equation, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and (thank you God) Tom Cruise/Katie "Kate Cruise" Holmes are nowhere in sight. But on the negative, did more people care to read about Madonna's lack of airplay in the US than about troop levels in Iraq? Than about the genocide in Darfur? Than about a plot to blow some British Airways planes out of the sky?
Wow. It would be interesting to see what some other news outlets had for their top ten, because I really want to believe that a majority of people wouldn't rather read about Mel Gibson's new movie than about...hell, anything else even remotely important.
1 comment:
I do believe, by all accounts, that their most read stories aren't exactly the "most read stories anywhere, at any time in 2006."
If so, I'd really like to know how they arrived at that statistic. If they were just counting page hits on their website, they should account for spambots looking for e-mail accounts, metacrawlers (like Google) that build a cache database, and things like MSN Live that (annoyingly) bat celebrity news at you everytime you sign into anything that uses it.
I think perhaps the most hit site in 2006 is the phoenetic lesson on how to pronounce "Ahmadinejad."
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