Last week I conducted a little experiment. I intentionally put up an admittedly unexciting blog post and prefaced it on Facebook with, “Please don't read if you are easily offended.” My hypothesis was that this comment would significantly increase the blog’s traffic, even from the very individuals I was attempting to dissuade. Typically, the total hits from a new post is around fifty. More exciting / controversial posts may be around seventy, and the less exciting are around forty. I would put last week’s post in the latter category, as I doubt most readers find conversations around proper use of a bell curve particularly stimulating.
The experimental post received ninety hits, more than twice the number I would have expected had I not prefaced the post with a misleading notion of controversy. It’s probably safe to say that the reason for the increased traffic is due solely to that small tag line.
I think that ploy could only work once, even if I had not shared the results in full transparency. But it’s still an interesting notion to think that banning something has the exact opposite effect of that intended. Contrarily, if schools don’t want students to read a particular book, maybe they should put it on a “Recommended Reading List” instead.