Sex still sells for us and for EUTube

As with all bloggers, watching the statistics on traffic has become a bit of a way to while away the hours. We can’t help but click that refresh button repeatedly in the hope that the line on the graph moves every upwards. Who said consultants aren’t vain?

There are of course some simple home truths out there. There is a correlation between the number of posts we make in any given week and the number of visitors we get. (If only there was less work and more time to write blog posts.) Referrals from our FH corporate and FH Brussels websites generate decent amounts of traffic as do the links on other blogs. However, we are still not being read by the vast majority of the 15,000 “lobbyists” in Brussels. Must try harder.

Just as interesting are the search terms used to find us. There are some good ones from our perspective, “public affairs brussels”, “public affairs digital” etc. But one that repeatedly comes up is “European public sex”. What a disappointment we must be for those who type those three words into Google. It seems however that we are not the only ones still getting traffic on the back of the smutty pastimes of our fellow man. A search term that brought a visitor to our blog, “EUtube analysis”, led us back to TubeMogul to see how the Commission’s YouTube channel was getting on.

EUTube visitors

As you can see a large proportion of their traffic is still on the video that has a large dose of arghs, oohs and eeks. We added a couple of the Commission’s recent videos to make a comparison. The video on renewable energy, a hot topic around the 23rd January proposal from the Commission, is a small blip in comparison. As is a video from the Comms department on the EU and the citizen. Is there a learning in all of this? Sex sells. Ok, we knew that. But there is a big difference between making informercials about what the EU does and making a video that catches the European public’s imagination. We may be content to have a small audience inside the Brussels Bubble, but is the Commission?