Behind the Blog: How About Them Eggs

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk about traffic, a return to Azeroth, egg prices and bullying.

EMANUEL: For years, when I typed the letter “C” into my address bar it autocompleted to Chartbeat.com, the tool VICE used for tracking traffic. There were a few ways to track how Motherboard was performing that were more meaningful, but the traffic data was clear and in real-time, allowing us to see exactly how many people were on any given story at any given time, so I checked it obsessively for years, typing the URL multiple times a day or just leaving the chart open on a second monitor to see how our stories were doing. 

What was considered good numbers changed wildly over the years. When I first started at VICE the numbers were very high because they were artificially inflated by Facebook and the company itself doing shady traffic arbitrage to juice its ad business. When that shell game ended, the new normal was much lower traffic but we’d still get occasional reminders on how absurd it could be to chase those numbers. 

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