I was once again feverishly checking the Google Analytics for my blog, which no one reads, when I got an incredible shock. One of my blog posts got 5,000 hits in a day! "Hooray," I thought. "Now I have an audience of loyal readers! Next, I'm gonna get a book deal and help crowd the humor section of Barnes and Noble with another blog-to-book. Yes! I can finally prove that my blog is better than the rest with numbers. Quantifiable proof!!!" The next day, after I framed a certificate that said, "Congratulations On Doing It," I checked Analytics and saw my hits went down to 100 per day. The following day -- zero. What happened? Answer: StumbleUpon. Somehow my post on wanting to have sex with Carmen Sandiego got into the StumbleUpon rotation, but since the site encourages web channel changing, these new visitors quickly tuned out of my site to Stumble onto an animated GIF of a man falling down or a flash cartoon about cows from 1997.

The exact same thing happened with another article. Huge spike, then immediate drop off. This time, I put up "ghey" phrases in the sidebar like "Welcome Stumblers" and inserted a Stumble button that only Stumbled onto my own blog. They were too tricky for any of those tactics, and they left again. Damn it, Stumblers. How do I get you to stay? It can't be my content, because my content is all perfect. Maybe I need to sacrifice a lolcat or design my site so if you Stumble away, it'll come up again in 30 pop-up windows that hide behind your main browser. That'll show you! Or maybe it's just incredibly difficult to keep Stumblers on one site, by nature of their surfing habits. If that's the case, then StumbleUpon is the monkey's paw of web traffic. "You want visitors? Your wish is my command. You'll get to taste the traffic you've always wanted... for one day. Then never again! Wuahahahaha!" Wuahahahaha indeed. [Editor's note: Stumble Upon and Reddit pull at the heartstrings of this very site. Over 150,000 thousand people showed up to read this. The next day a mere 846 people came back to read this. Why won't you stay, DAMMIT!?]