The power of obnoxiou$

In September 2006, I started a blog called Ugly Betty Recaps. All I was going to do there was recaps of, yep, you guessed it, Ugly Betty.

I knew that most readers probably wouldn't leave comments on the site, so I put up a Sitemeter to find out who was visiting and how they found the page.

It takes a while to recap an hour-long drama show, and I quickly discovered that the sooner I put up the recap, the more hits I was likely to get. If the recap wasn't up yet when people started looking for it, they'd go to another site instead. On one particular occasion, there was an especially good episode that I was able to recap quickly, and I got what I considered to be a whopping 190 hits in the next 24 hours - far more than my previous record, and several times larger than my usual average for the day after an episode.

Anyway. I started doing something else on that site, called "Great Moments in Office Episodes." It was a totally goofy thing where I'd just post list of funny lines in an episode. At times, more people were showing up to read those than the Betty recaps, even though they weren't recaps and required virtually no effort or creativity on my part.

So. The writers' strike began, Betty and Office were out of the picture, and Celebrity Apprentice hit the airwaves. Even though it fills me with self-loathing to watch a regular Apprentice series, never mind the even dumber celebrity version, I've never been able to stop; in fact I've kept scorecards each season. I figured I might as well recap the show so that the blog didn't feel neglected.

It turns out that it's pretty easy to recap an Apprentice episode quickly. That didn't surprise me. What did surprise me is the number of people who have surfed in to read these recaps. More than the Betty recaps, more than the Office moments... sometimes more than both combined.

For example: last night, the dreaded Omarosa got fired. Since then, I've had more than 400 hits - more than twice my previous record. And it's not even a completed recap. It's just a very spare outline of the task, with a more detailed summary of the boardroom scene. I can't attribute this to my recapping skills, because most of these readers seem to be newcomers looking for a summary of what they missed. They just want more Apprentice.

But, c'mon... 400? I am gobsmacked! I guess I know now why Trump likes Omarosa so much. She couldn't sell hot chocolate to an Eskimo, but she can inspire great contempt which, when harnessed properly, sells lots of advertising time.

It's not my favorite thing about our culture.