The frenzy surrounding the Jeremy Lin has largely died down. At BuzzFeed's data center, we took this as an opportunity to analyze some data about the Linsanity phenomenon in the publishing industry. So we generated a list of Linsanity-related posts on BuzzFeed and our partner network of publishers, representing over 300 million monthly unique visitors. Then we looked at how the number of such posts evolved over time and how much traffic they got. The data is shown below.
What's interesting here are that the biggest daily increases in traffic followed Knicks' losses. The biggest increase followed the February 17th loss, largely due to the now infamous "error" by an ESPN editor. The 2nd biggest daily increase came after the February 20th loss, with large traffic to posts like "Kim Kardashian Wants to Date Jeremy Lin" and "Saturday Night Live Takes on Linsanity." Overall, these types of posts, unrelated to actual basketball playing, received the biggest traffic numbers.
The message is clear--Jeremy Lin needs to stop leading the Knicks to victory so that we can focus on his dating habits and racist admirers.