The Internet is a weird creature.
For a few years, the engagement announcement of two people with the last names of Wang and DeCock was inforum.com’s most-read story ever.
Now the Grand Forks Herald, our sister paper to the north, has Marilyn Hagerty.
Her simple, down-to-earth tone of her Olive Garden restaurant review immediately went viral, being picked up by dozens of other websites, including our own. At noon Friday, the column remained at the most-read story for the day at grandforksherald.com and by the power of social media sites, the article was posted to Facebook more than 21,000 times and tweeted 14,300 times.
These numbers had me thinking, so I did a little research.
Wang-DeCock had 81,607 views on inforum.com. So far, Hagerty’s column has had 323,000 hits on grandforksherald.com.
- An average top story on inforum.com is 10,000 views
- An average top story on grandforksherald.com is 4,000 views
This means Hagerty’s article has generated a 7,975 percent increase, while our engagement story garnered a (relative just) 716 percent increase over a typical most-read story.
More perspective
The top day for inforum.com was March 27, 2009, when it collected 392,836 hits, which was when Fargo was hanging on by a thread to save itself from the raging Red River flood.
Shortly after 2 p.m. Friday, 349,000 people had read Marilyn’s single article worldwide.
With more stories on Hagerty popping up, including one by the Star Tribune this afternoon and another by The Associated Press’ Dave Kolpack, which is now on the AP’s national wire, her celebrity status will continue to rise.
That’s going viral for sure, and the storm isn’t over yet.
Please would you people stop feeding this story. The reason it gets so much attention is that it makes ND look like a joke. “A bunch of rural elderly rubes think Olive Garden is amazing Italian food”. The rest of the country thinks we’re a joke. GF Herald you should not be proud of these hits!
Brandon, that is not at all the feeling of the many friends I have who have visited the site to read this review. For us, it was the refreshing honesty, lack of pretense and irony, and true sense of enjoyment in this review. Sure, the OG may be a place that some of us “city slickers” are sometimes quick to dismiss (without any real reason), but this is a sweet and honest reminder that enjoying a nice meal need not be something that requires an unlimited budget, the right connections, or knowing the chef at the hot new eatery in town. Far from looking at ND as “a joke” as you put it, it made many of us feel connected to a part of the country that we often don’t hear about, and to honestly wish we could be there to enjoy the breadsticks with her some day.
Brandon is right ,the story just feeds on itself, with the curious and the ‘victimized’ all contributing to the snowball effect.
Snobs makin fun of rubes? So we jump into the childish ruckus?
This kinda reminds me of the “Devil Wears Prada ‘ movie where the film mocks the snobbery of the Meryl Streep character who mocked the corn fed, new to New York ,Ann Hathaway character.
Yeah this what we need more of, more high school -like , cliquish behavior.
GF Herald . your Pulitzer is being tarnished by this. Grow up!