I hate to give you two rants in a row, but this I've been needing to say this for awhile. I started the original Desdinova - Super Villain of the Ozarks blog in 2007 and The New Adventures of Desdinova four years ago this month. Since that time, it has been an ongoing struggle to figure out how many people are reading the blogs and exactly what post they are reading.
I have used the Google Analytics, the Blogger stats and Feedjit. They give me some idea, although not a thorough picture of what is going on. I would like to know more about why and from where they are coming. Many times it may show the name of the search engine, but not if it is a link on another page.
There are times when I get sudden multiple hits on a post and I wonder if it is a link shared on another blog or social media. My fear is the my blog is being used in some way by a clickbait sight. Clickbait sights are the prostitutes of the Internet and spread their V.D on social media.
For those who don't know the terminology, clickbait is a sight used to drive Internet users to sight loaded with tones of streamed commercials and click though ads. Sometime these websites link to other websites or blogs in order to use there articles. Other times these clickbait sights create their own content. Usually, when they do create their own content, it is either some tabloid style garbage or badly researched articles masquerading as an informative article.
On the first account, the article is something trashing famous celebrity or the entertainment industry in general (i.e. "Can You Guess Which Movie Stars are Ugly and Smell Bad?") or it is something macabre or freaky (usually Victorian era postmortem photographs) or hokey stuff passed off as something "you just have to see" ("Watch this dog sing "Amazing Grace" the funeral of a soldier").
The other is either right-wing propaganda and misinformation or it misrepresents itself by being badly researched and full of errors. Now, I will add here that I do know of one sight that linked to me for an article on a classic motion picture. The author also credited my blog, so I guess there can be some good in these.
The trick with these is to force you to watch a commercial or by something. Many of these exist to infect your computer, phone or tablet with spyware. Bad part these are shared on Facebook or Pinterest over and over again.
Do me a favor, if you come across any of my articles linked on one of these sights, please e-mail me at d4windsbar@yahoo.com. I want to see if I can get it removed before I get a disease.
