CORRECTION: A previous iteration of this list included Morbid Angel and The Dillinger Escape Plan and excluded Avenged Sevenfold and System of a Down. Both of these omissions were due to botched mathematical calculations on our part. Our sincerest apologies to all parties involved.

Original Post:

There exist a myriad of ways by which a metal band can measure success: record sales and chart positions, positive critical reaction and awards garnered, concert attendance, merch sales, mainstream awareness, and/or, ideally, a sense of satisfaction at having expressed oneself in a creative manner. And all of these achievements are valid, which is why the very notion of “success” is subjective.

But also fuck all of that because the only thing that matters is what the Internet thinks.

We’re exaggerating for comedic effect, of course… although you have to admit: a band or artist whose very name alone automatically piques interest certainly wields power.

So we went back through the last five years of traffic on MetalSucks and figured out which fifty metal bands and artists generated the most pageviews during that period. You can view the entire list below, in ascending order. Obviously, the means by which this list was generated is not an exact science — MetalSucks is popular, but it is, after all, just one website. Still, this gives you a solid sense of which bands are magnets for traffic, plus the marketing & analytics experts at Avidon Marketing Group approved our approach. The answers may surprise you.

A few notes about our methodology:

Pageview totals were calculated by adding together the numbers on all individual posts where the headline contained the name of the band.

Numbers were culled from Google Analytics, then sorted and quantified in Excel

Numbers include headlines that featured a key member of the band; i.e. headlines containing “Dave Mustaine” were grouped together with Megadeth, headlines containing “Robb Flynn” were grouped together with Machine Head, etc. Duplicates (headlines that contained both band name and member name) have only been counted once.

Two of the bands on our list have had online slot games named after them which you can check out at PlayFrank if you feel like rocking out whilst trying to win some cold hard cash!

The list is based purely on total pageview numbers and is not weighted for post frequency. In other words, it is possible that a band garnered a higher total number of pageviews than another band simply because they were in the news more often.

Connected to the above, bands who released new music and/or toured in the past five years are much more likely to appear on this list (or higher up on it) than bands who did only one or neither of those things, or did them less than other bands.

Alright… have at it!

50. Thy Art is Murder

49. Ozzy Osbourne

48. Dragonforce

47. Asking Alexandria

46. Killswitch Engage

45. Dream Theater

44. Gojira

43. All That Remains

42. Disturbed

41. The Black Dahlia Murder

40. System of a Down

39. Anthrax

38. Judas Priest

37. Meshuggah

36. Attila

35. Linkin Park

34. Insane Clown Posse

33. Deftones

32. Periphery

31. Limp Bizkit

30. Suicide Silence

29. Devin Townsend

28. Danzig

27. GWAR

26. Behemoth

25. Marilyn Manson

24. Cannibal Corpse

23. The Faceless

22. Black Sabbath

21. Five Finger Death Punch

20. Avenged Sevenfold

19. Dio

18. Veil of Maya

17. As I Lay Dying

16. Emmure

15. Motörhead

14. Babymetal

13. Lamb of God

12. Korn

11. Tool

10. Pantera

9. Machine Head

8. Mastodon

7. Iron Maiden

6. Guns N’ Roses

5. Ghost

4. Megadeth

3. Slayer

2. Slipknot

1. Metallica