My other working title for what I will readily admit is a rant was, 10 Things You Can Do To Boycott Top 10 Lists.
It seems like every publication has a Top 10 this or, if they can’t think of 10 things, a Top 5 that. Every clever email marketer does the same thing. You open the email and the headline reads (hold on, digging for one I just got), 5 Awesome Marketing Blogs.
And you think to yourself, holy shit, I MUST click on that link to see what the 5 Awesome Marketing Blogs are. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know about these 5 handy, must-read marketing blogs.
Online publications and marketers constantly create these lists because, well, we click on them. And they know it. Creating a Top 10 list, of practically any topic, is the easiest, mail it in way to generate lots of links, tweets, retweets, traffic to your site, or clicks on your email marketing headline.
Top 10 Travel Spots for 2011. Top 10 Luxury Yachts. Top 5 Must Eat Restaurants in NYC for the New Year. 10 Beautiful Photos from 2010. 10 Most Important News Stories of 2010, Top 10 Poops I Pooped In 2010 That Resemble Famous Celebrities (WITH PICTURES), 10 Worst Celebrity Plastic Surgeries of 2010, 10 Most Important Tweets of 2010 (I’m looking at you @twitter).
I could go on and on all day long coming up with Top 10 list ideas – they’re ridiculously easy to brainstorm – and have an intern write the Top 10s for each list. We can publish one Top 10 per day and wait for millions of you to click on it, page by page, from 1 to 10. And me, I get to deliver advertisement after advertisement to you and show my advertisers page views popping like popcorn.
So I want to propose a novel concept, especially as we near the end of the year and everyone creates their best of 2010 lists as an easy way to drive traffic to their sites and page view stats that are, well, 5 – 10 times as robust as they should be due to the very nature of a Top 5 or Top 10 list.
Please boycott Top 10 lists. Restrain yourself. Hold back on the bug to light (or bug to pooh, or bug to a 500 watt light bulb placed in pooh) urge to click on a Top 10 list. You can do it, I know you can. And if we all refrain from clicking, even for a month, like during lent, it may not matter or make a difference in the grand scheme of life, but it will make me happy. Don’t you want me to be happy?
* NOTE: The arts and crafts part of this article, creating the headline collage, actually took me longer than writing the rant itself.
** NOTE: I’m interested to see what kind of Search Engine Friendly Traffic I get from people actually searching for things like Top 10 Male Enhancement Products or Top 10 Spas and Yoga Retreats in America. If you unsuspectingly came here based on an actual search, be bold and let me know in the comments section below what you actually searched for.
