The Hills is Back (Driving Traffic)

August 20th, 2008 by Autumnn Darden| Posted in Celebrity Apartments | No Comments »

Well, there was much excitement at MyNewPlace this week. Not only did we announce yesterday that we had become the 16^th largest real estate site, but our favorite show, MTV’s The Hills, is back on the air.

It is not so much that we enjoy viewing panoramic shots of the general Los Angeles area, punctuated by contrived drivel between egocentric socialites, although that does seem extraordinarily riveting. Instead, we get excited because of all the organic traffic it drives to our site.

Organic Clicks for “hillside villas”

We first noticed this trend last April, when organic clicks for the property Hillside Villas were anomalously high. We traced the property back to the TV show and then did some mildly in depth coverage on how The Hills drove organic traffic when it aired.

This season, however, is different. The girls from the show don’t even live at the Hillside Villas anymore. We had reasoned before that since the show displays the name of the location where each scene takes place, that the show’s viewers, who have a tendency to be on their computers while watching television, had simply seen the name, googled it, and clicked on our property listing page for Hillside Villas, for which we ranked highly.

Now, however, we have no such causal link to explain what has spiked traffic. At first, it was nice to be able to discern the actual human action behind an organic click on our site, but now we just have to assume that people want to move in because the girls moved out.

Perhaps there is indeed a vacancy at Hillside Villas. Would you want to live in apartments for rent that were recently vacated by celebrities?