MyNewPlace Blog

Well, it's over. MyNewplace's brush with the glitterati has, for the foreseeable future, ended. Not only has the third season of MTV's hit show The Hills, concluded, but the girls have moved out of the “Hillside Villas" apartments. And so we lament, so goes quality television programming, so goes our organic traffic.

As you may know, we have been following the organic traffic of the typed keyword “Hillside Villas" ever since we noticed an anomalous spike in our analytics reports in early April. We quickly learned that our property listing page appeared in spot number three in Google's search engine results page for that keyword.

You can see on the graph below, how the increase of traffic from “Hillside Villas" peaks during the week that the girls move out of their apartment.

Weekly Traffic

Since the show prominently displays the locations of each scene, it was easy to see what was driving all the traffic. Even more interesting, however, was our ability to actually visually connect the spike in traffic to a specific human and computer interaction. It is a rare occurrence that a metrics report allows a picture of how traffic originates.

Episodes and Organic Traffic

In the graph above, the red line documents the number of organic clicks referred to our Hillside Villas property listing page. The green dashed lines indicate the dates that new shows aired on MTV.

Our contention is that the factor most directly driving organic traffic is the fact that until Adriana Patridge, Lauren Conrad and Lo moved out of the Hillside Villas apartments, many scenes took place at that location and therefore, its name was displayed multiple times during the episodes.

This, coupled with the rise in people who watch television while also using their laptops, has led to the fervent ‘googling' of the term, Hillside Villas.

Now, if this is true, our analytics reports also indicate that people are inclined to watch the first and last episode at the time of its airing. However, episodes in the middle of the season, people are inclined to record the show and watch it later at their convenience.

Is our contention accurate? Do you watch television and use your computer simultaneously?

Are you also more likely to watch season premieres and finales live, while recording less notable episodes?
Would you want to find an apartment for rent that had been previously occupied by a Hollywood star?

Related Posts on the MyNewPlace Blog

• The Hills Watch: Will the Girls Move Back into Hillside Villas?
• The Hills Watch: We Were Totally Right. OBVI.
• The Hills Sends MyNewPlace Traffic Skyward

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.