Cosmo et al

I mentioned before, I got linked to by Cosmo. The link in the article  traced back to my odds of divorce post. This same article has since been posted in Elle, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, and Harper’s Bazaar, virtually a who’s who of the women’s magazine world. The writer, Asher Fogle, seems to be a somewhat influential woman in this world, judging by her LinkedIn, which lists her as an editor at multiple high profile magazines.

This has led me to multiple observations:

First, do these people have not have editors. I have nothing against Asher, she didn’t slander me or anything, but I am unsure what she was thinking. I know nothing of her, but I am almost entirely sure she would, at the very least, disagree with almost everything I write. In addition, I write primarily badthink and none of these magazines seem the type to court badthink. Linking to me runs a risk of drawing the Eye of Soros. It doesn’t look like the author or any editors actually reviewed my site or the link beyond the data. This is interesting.

Second, I am almost surprised by the incestuousness of the women’s magazine sphere. The exact same article was posted on 5 different major magazine sites (that I know of). Did she get paid 5 different times for the article? After looking into it, it turns out all five magazines are owned by the same company, so probably not. A search also turned up that MSN had the same article, although, AFAIK, they have no ties to that company, so maybe she got paid twice.

Finally, the major one is how little traffic these sites sent me. Cosmo gave me a grand total of 42 hits, Good Housekeeping, Elle, and Marie Claire  gave me 4 each, and Harper’s gave me 6, for a grand total of 60 hits. MSN gave me none. As a comparison, 2015/08/08 Lightning Round sent anywhere from 30-200 hits per a link, in a single day (some sites with multiple links can receive up to 300-500 hits) . Over the last quarter a buried link from TRP over a similar time period sent me 70 hits, a Chaos Patch from Land can send over 60 hits, , a Free Republic link sent 130 hits, and a RooshV thread sent me 60 hits.

None of the other links are abnormally high: my aggregator, Reaction Times sends me 50-150 hits a post, a link from Viva la Manosphere nets 100-300 hits, some TRP links have sent thousands of hits, one link from Scott Alexander got me over 2000 hits. I could go on but you get the point.

Why are major, international, professional magazines with paid writers, editors, advertisers, web designers, etc. getting so outclassed in this area? I run a poorly edited blog consisting mainly of long-winded posts laced with grammatical mistakes and typos on arcane socio-political theory on the fringes of the already fringe edgysphere in my free time, yet a single link from me sends multiple times more traffic than five major corporate magazines combined.

Their Alexa ranks destroy mine (although, being in the top 260,000 sites in the world for the kind of blog I run is still pretty decent, I think), so it’s probably not due to traffic.

Is it because the women who read 15-point clickbait lists aren’t the type to click-through to the source? Do they read nothing but the headlines? I was in one of the later points, maybe they can’t read more than a couple hundred words at a time? Was it the article itself? Is divorce risk simply not interesting to women?

I’m not sure what the reason is, but I found this discrepancy rather odd. When I saw Cosmo pop up in my referrers, I thought I’d get a deluge of visitors and was worried a minor internet outrage storm might engulf me. But instead, I got less hits than I do from a buried link on a random TRP thread.

8 comments

  1. These magazines are mainly picture books to flip through unless you have an arresting title like ‘ make skin baby soft in 10 days’. It is for carrying ads with a few filler articles in between. Hence the lax editing and repetition of content. No one really reads them not even the ‘authors’.

  2. This “story” has me very curious.

    I wonder if we can find similar examples of this to other magazine sites and if they actually produce traffic for those they link to.

    One possibility is one that has been somewhat mentioned – that the readers of Cosmo (1) don’t do any actual fact-checking or further research on the “articles” they read, (2) the readers of the magazine scan and click to the next page/story on the site.

    It does however appear that the readers of Cosmo are probably much less interactive with the material they come across. Not particularly shocking.

  3. my two cents is people that read this and similar sites like to trace back and ensure the information they receive is accurate. trust but verify comes to mind. as well as just a general desire to acquire knowledge.

  4. Look at the Womynz magazines you mentioned. Their reader base doesn’t actually read. They look at pictures, skim headlines, recipes, and when they surf off they head over to celeb junkporn sites.

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