Horse Sex Story Tops Seattle Times Most Popular 2005 List

Horse Sex Story Tops 'Seattle Times' Most Popular List for 2005--But Here's Why
By Greg Mitchell
E & P
Published: December 30, 2005 10:30 AM ET

After reviewing the number of hits top local stories at his newspaper's Web site got in 2005, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat concludes today, "As I look back at the year in news, it's clear I should have focused more on people having sex with horses."

Indeed, four of the most-clicked stories on the Web site this year, including the #1 finisher ("by far"), had to do with the same incident: the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw. The sex act was video taped. The farm was known on the Internet as a "destination site" for all kinds of sex with animals.

Westneat says, referring to the most popular list, "It's not a survey of what news you say you read. It's what you actually read."

In fact, the #1 horse sex story may have been "the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history. I don't know whether to ignore this alarming factoid or to embrace it." He added: "Or, maybe, some of us are not giving readers enough of what you really want."

But this may all be highly misleading.

E&P also ran a Web story on the horse incident last summer--focusing, of course, on how the local press handled this seamy story, and it, too, proved to be massively popular, generating enormous traffic. But as with the Seattle Times' #1 piece--and unmentioned in Westneat's column--the major reason for that was a link on the outrageously popular Drudge Report.

In other words, this was not our core audience--and in the case of the Seattle paper, not their core audience either. In fact, it wasn't even "local" but national and international. The E&P story, we found, in looking at our Web linkages, was also picked up on various fetish and humor sites, and this no doubt happened with the Times' story as well.

With that in mind, the story really should be moved down in the Seattle rankings. And at least one of the other horse sex stories at the paper also made Drudge.

No doubt the stories gained a tremendous number of local eyeballs beyond Drudge. But editors need to analyze where traffic is coming from before jumping to conclusions on what a core audience really wants. Besides, how many horse sex death cases can you count on?
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Greg Mitchell ([email protected]) is editor of E&P.