Suicide by Satire?

Back on the thorny subject of web traffic, or the recent lack thereof, to be precise. After speaking to other site owners, I was ready to simply put the last couple of months dreadful dip in traffic down to the 'summer slump' - a combination of good weather, people going on holiday, students being away from college and sporting events often result in people being drawn away from the web at this time of year. But then I got to thinking, I hadn't experienced this sort of thing over the previous couple of summers. So what was different this year? Well, most obviously, the stories I was running. So, I decided to remind myself of what I was running this time last year. The difference with this summer was startling - last year we had rampaging giant breasts, naked wrestling ex-Presidents, celebrity animal killers, smoking terrorists, swastika spankings and sado-masochistic secret agents dominating the front page. Sensational stuff that drew the in the punters in droves.

Compare that to this summer, when I made the mistake of running mainly straightforward (by The Sleaze's standards, anyway), political satire. Bad mistake! As I've noted before, the commonest search terms bringing visitors to the site seem to concern smut and perversion. These stories just weren't going to do it! Interestingly, the publication ofA Life in Pictures which kick started a modest recovery in traffic to The Sleaze. Whilst not a provocative title, and although it contains no smut, the story has proven popular. To capitalise on this success, I quickly followed it up with The Day the Earth Got Spanked, a heady mixture of aliens, abductions and flagellation. Again, a winner in traffic terms. Traffic this week has been much stronger (although today isn't too clever, so far). Consequently, another slice of satirical smut tentatively titled Sex in Space is currently in the works.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, I hate to say it, but we've pretty much confirmed that satire just doesn't sell to the great unwashed of the web. This is emphasised by the fact that, thanks to some tweaking of title and description tags, the site now ranks pretty highly in Google for searches like 'political satire'. Has that resulted in any new traffic? No. None at all. As if we needed reminding, the truth is that most web users seem to be searching for porn. A depressing truth. Still, at least my traffic seems to be improving (in terms of visitors, if not page views) after two utterly dire months. I'll just have to be satisfied with that.