HuffPo covers up its skin fixation
by henrycopelandTuesday, August 25th, 2009
There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.
Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.
The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.
While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.
For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:
And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges:
August 26th, 2009 at Aug 26, 09 | 12:04 am
FWIW, I don’t doubt your interpretation, but I asked Huffington Post why they switched (thinking I might write a post about it for the Nieman Journalism Lab) and got this statement: “Our Most Popular module has always been based on a combination of factors — including page views — and that process has not changed. During our latest redesign, prompted by our recent launch of HuffPost Social News, we decided to put the focus on the number of comments an entry has received as a way of highlighting our community and the increasingly social nature of news, and to encourage community engagement.”