Some Armchair Demographic Research

Towards the end of this most recent weekend, concerned (and likely bespectacled) reader Matt Defalco noted some strange traffic patterns occurring at our parent site — which patterns he captured and rendered into a highly compatible image format.

To wit:

As you can see there, via both your eyes and large portions of your cerebral cortex, Red Sox-er Josh Beckett’s player page was visited almost 27,000 times on Sunday — or, approximately 26,500 more times than the next most-viewed page.

We shan’t bother here with the various whys and wherefores regarding Beckett’s page and its popularity that day. Those explanations, like all explanations, are likely mundane and tedious.

What we will consider is what possible effect the aforementioned traffic patterns might’ve had on the demographic profile of the site. For it was only about 48 hours later that the author was met by this ad — one that he (read: I) had never seen before in these electronic pages — while preparing to enjoy our man Dave Cameron’s most recent chat (an image you’re free to click for the purposes of embiggening):

That, as anyone can see, is a video still of a lady dancing next to a bottle of Nair — one of our time’s most famous and most sassy hair-removal products. You will note, given both the sheen of her legs and the generally carefree attitude with which she’s conducting herself, that she has not only recently used the aforementioned depilatory, but she has enjoyed using it — and that she wants us to enjoy using it, too.

While we, all of us, know that correlation is different than causation, it’s striking, isn’t it, the timing of this advertisement relative to the recent, and perhaps unbalanced, surge in traffic?

Conclusions I leave to you, reader. These are just what the French call “The Facts” (although they have their own word for it, one assumes).