celebrity gossip, academic style

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart Caught in the Act — And now they’ll give me web traffic!

(Image from Pop Sugar; originally nabbed by X17)

FACT: Talk about Twilight, and you will get web traffic.

FACT: Passionate, angry, and upset fans may attack you based on your post, but you will still have web traffic.

FACT: Simply by posting the image above — the first “irrefutable” evidence of a romance between the two stars of Twilight — I will up my daily web traffic by as much as 1000 visitors a day. Some arrive simply to view the image, but many stay and read the article that surrounds it. I know because their comments continue to accumulate.

FACT: Academic blogs (like this one) may not be fueled by numbers of visitors, but for-profit ones most certainly are.

FINAL FACT: Twilight posts, sneak peeks, trailers, gossip, and speculation have turned into a self-perpetuating phenomenon: even if people don’t necessarily care about them, and even if there’s not really news, if you post it, the fans will come. And the fans will continue to come as more information is promised — as my friend Nick recently posited in our co-authored forthcoming article on celebrity twittering, “there can never be enough information on a star; therefore, more information is always needed.” The fan hopes for one crucial piece of info — a picture, a quip, a video snippet — that promises provide access to the authentic kernel of the star. In the case of Twilight, the revelation of the apparent Pattinson/Stewart relationship only further expands the desire for more information: now that we’ve seen them touching, can’t we see them kissing? Won’t that tell us everything we need to know? About them, our own hopes invested in their romance, and love in general?

Of course not. But the promise of fulfillment continues to guide the currents of web traffic. In many ways, the phenomenon isn’t that different from the dilemma facing magazine publishers every week: if a magazine puts Pattinson on the cover, as Vanity Fair did this month, they will come.

But with so much celebrity discourse and photo/video evidence available for free online, they may not buy. Which is exactly why Vanity Fair pulled the brilliant (if obvious) move of not only putting its Pattinson story behind a pay wall, but also leaking excerpts early and promising additional photos to further encourage ‘hard copy’ purchase.

But there’s something slightly different at stake when it comes to internet traffic. Print journalists — especially those associated with long established magazines such as People, US Weekly, or Vanity Fair — love a high sell-through number, but they aren’t individually tasked with cultivating a sustained readership for a particular internet site. In the fickle world of internet traffic, readers are sometimes loyal, but rarely. If they are loyal, it’s often to a syndicater — a home blog that links regularly to sites of interest, such as Perez Hilton, Huffington Post, Jezebel, etc. Thus the impetus is both on the syndicater (to find links) and the satellite blogs (to get linked).

The ultimate goal: go viral. And while very few stories or pictures go as ‘singularly’ viral as, say, The JK Wedding Video or “Dick in a Box,” you still want your particular story to be widely linked. Some sites, including the Gawker Media Family, have historically based their pay scale on the amount of hits garnered, thus encouraging authors to post the most salacious, scandalous, or outrageous material possible in hopes of going viral. (Gawker has supposedly since ceased such practices).

Well-paid bloggers have a particular impetus to garner massive amounts of hits. Take, for example, Nikki Finke. As Anne Thompson recently reported, Finke is frustrated by the pressure to regularly pull in large numbers at her new home with mail.com, regularly forefronts what she names “shameless plug for Twilight traffic,” as evidenced below:

Of course, Thompson herself courts Twilight traffic from her new home at Indiewire — she’s posted her one-on-one (and admittedly adorable) video with Pattinson twice in the last week alone (while also hyping the new V.F. cover, including a sneak-peak excerpt). And while Lainey Gossip declares a general dislike for the saga, she nevertheless has cornered the market on on-set filming updates from her home base of Vancouver, B.C.

But Twilight fuels more than just blogs like Deadline Hollywood Daily, Thompson on Hollywood, and Cinematical. It also drives traffic to social networking and corporate sites; indeed, following the premiere of the New Moon trailer on the MTV Movie Awards, Finke declared the traffic stats “astounding“:

Summit Entertainment has a count of 4.2 million views for the New Moon trailer from MySpace, and another 1.6 million from MTV.com, so that’s 5.8 million combined views in the first 24 hours from its two domestic online launch partners. By comparison, the 3rd (and last) trailer for Twilight received 3.2 million views in its first 48 hours on MySpace, piddling compared to viewership for the sequel’s trailer.

The hype — and monetary potential — is huge. In a tight market, Twilight content has emerged as one of the few sure bets.

Which is also why Twilight drives the content of small and middling blogs, including this one. While I honestly did not write my post “Why Kristen Stewart Matters” with the intent of garnering massive attention, part of me certainly did know that such a post was more likely to get picked up by the likes of MovieCityNews, which had previously linked to several of my star-based posts. And yet, as I’ve explained before, I had no idea that a small blog post could spread — or be valuable — to as many readers as it did. It was Tweeted and re-Tweeted, Facebooked, posted on a dozen Twilight blogs, discussion boards, and Livejournals. When Lainey Gossip linked to me, the traffic went through the roof — over 12,500 hits in a single 24-hour period. I’m still regularly receiving new links to the original post (and the meta-post on Twilight hate mail that followed).

And then there’s the photos. One of the photos I posted of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson has already garnered 40,000 hits. It’s nested in the piece, of course, but people get there via some sort of image search — which means that such hits do and do not count. Some stay and read the piece; most are just looking for a picture of them touching each other in magic hour lighting (see below).

Of course, since I’m a non-profit blogger, hits have very little financial value. But what happens when I attempt to use my blog as a proto-academic achievement? How do I emphasize the reach of my posts and the blog in general? Are hits an appropriate measure? If they are, shouldn’t I just switch the entire topic of this blog to Twilight? Alternately, if I want to use advertising to pay off the student loans accrued while attending an academic institution that insists on paying its Ph.D. students beneath the poverty line while requiring us to pay up to $1000 per semester in ‘fees’ (n.b., I have no qualms in outing our university, especially since state law prevents us from unionizing and thus challenging exploitative labor practices), hits certainly do matter.

Which is all to say that content — ‘professional,’ ‘journalistic,’ academic, gossip — is motivated by trends and results. It’s not necessarily rooted in what’s happening in the industry (although Twilight and its production company, Summit, are certainly indicative of currents in the industry as a whole) but in what audiences are most motivated. This is why some shows with small but vocal (and motivated) fan bases can compel certain shows to stay on the air: not because networks are necessarily sympathetic to pleas of ‘it’s quality TV,’ but because they recognize the potency of the show’s fans. And Twilight fans, like those of Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries, are female, between the ages of 12 and 40, and ready to spend. On spin-offs, for info, for premiere tickets, to see sneak preview footage. They pay with actual dollars, but they also pay with their time: through internet searches, repeat trailer viewings, and gossip site searches.

Richard Corman’s famous “Peter Pan Theory” stated that you should always pitch a movie to a 19-year-old boy in order to get the broadest audience. The enormous summer gross of Transformers 2 certainly proves the thesis true. But Twilight, whose four books have dominated the New York Times best seller list for the last two years (and, with New Moon, is poised to become one of the top advance ticket sellers of all time) is proving that the cross-mediated text — and its enormous potential for exploitation — should cater to the girls.