An average story on monroenews.com gets anywhere from 500 to 2,000 page views.

Bigger stories get 3,000 to 4,000 page views, and occasionally a story will top 5,000 page views. The entire site only gets about 40,000 page views a day, and the most we’ve ever had on a day was 55,000.

So imagine my surprise when I glanced at the Web stats yesterday and saw our traffic for the day soaring above anything I’d seen before.

At 5 p.m., the site already had  50,000 page views and was projecting to top 80,000 for the day.

“What could be causing that,” I said to myself. I didn’t know of any big stories.

So I checked the individual story stats, and there it was. The story about a truck called King Kong by its owner - a very unusual truck, to be sure - had already topped 20,000 page views and the number was growing by the minute.

By this morning, it’s over 35,000 page views - more than the entire site gets on some days. And the monroenews.com Web site topped 82,000 page views for May 6 and was headed for similar numbers today.

So, what happened? It didn’t take long for me to figure it out. It’s called Fark.com.

If you’re not familiar with it, Fark.com is a Web site devoted to unusual stories. It’s kind of an on-line version of “news of the weird.”

Someone sent the King Kong truck story to Fark.com, where it was displayed prominently among their “Not News” stories of the day. As of mid-morning today, 28,500 page views on monroenews.com were referred from Fark.com.

In addition, another 11,000 page views were created when people clicked on the photo of the truck, to see the larger version.

It’s fun to have a local story get noticed on a national Web site, even if it’s only Fark.com. But that’s generally not where our traffic comes from.

Most visitors to monroenews.com and MonroeTalks.com come from the local area. We know that from their IP providers, which our system keeps track of.

Links to national Web sites create some one-time excitement. The last time we had a story go national - before yesterday our most page views ever - was the traffic stop of three University of Michigan football players last May when drugs were found in the car. That story received 14,000 page views, most coming from national sports Web sites.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under The Evening News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.