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by nimblegorilla 3682 days ago
Trump gets more page views per article than anyone but Clinton. From the article's graphs it looks like Trump generated more page views than all other candidates combined. Trump's behavior writes news articles by itself. If it takes 50% of the reporting effort to get the same number of clicks then I think the media's obsession is supported.
2 comments
guywithnose 3682 days ago
You're absolutely right and the Parsely article completely ignored this fact. There is probably some truth to 'the public reads whatever it is the media decides to write about', but they are completely ignoring the law of diminishing return. If someone artificially limited the number of articles about trump to not exceed the number of articles about Clinton, all the people who want to read about Trump would flood those articles. This would also deter journalists from writing all the low quality articles. The large quantity of low quality articles are also pulling down the average, hiding the fact that the good articles are getting much more page views. These are the articles that make other journalists want a piece of that pie.
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synference 3682 days ago
That's not true. If you're looking at the interactive chart, you need to check the box that says "Show page views per article". Otherwise you're just seeing raw pageviews, and Trump has more of those because there were so many more articles written on him.
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blowski 3682 days ago
I think that's what @nimblegorilla was suggesting, and I think it actually fits with what the article was saying - the ROI on writing an article on Trump is much better than for other candidates because it's easy to write yet another article, and still get loads of pageviews for it.

In addition, Trump has significantly pushed up the total number of pageviews going to election cycle articles, even if the articles specifically about him are not as popular as the articles about Sanders, Clinton, Cruz, etc.

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nimblegorilla 3682 days ago
I'm not sure what you are disputing. The page views per article graph shows Trump within 10% of Clinton on a per article basis.
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