Things were moving along like any typical Monday morning – Tim and I were outside working on our tans while our unpaid army of Oompa Loompas put the finishing touches on last week’s issue – until Luke Bonner tweeted out a link to our story about the tour of Concord he and his NBA champion brother, Matt, led with the Larry O’Brien Trophy a few weeks back.
Luke – who is much more popular on Twitter than we are – got the ball rolling, and his horde of followers took it and ran. Notifications of retweets began trickling in, until someone highlighted the photo of Matt on the bench (in the screenshot to the right) with the note that “this may be the most Matt Bonner picture ever.”
That’s when the trickle officially became a flood. And it’s also how we eventually ended up being linked to by internet giant and purveyor of all things quirky and sporty, Deadspin.
The Twitter barrage led to more than 40 mentions and retweets in less than an hour, including some from San Antonio basketball blogs and other connected types, and that’s when Tim fielded a phone call.
From the San Antonio Express-News.
When one of their sports writers asked to use our story and photo for a blog entry, we thought we’d hit the big time.
That post ultimately never made its way to the interwebs, as far as we can tell, but a few minutes later, that no longer mattered.
My email lit up with a new message, from Samer Kalaf, staff writer at Deadspin, asking if he could post a story and link back to us.
Here is a full transcript of all the printable words we uttered while reacting: .
An appearance on Deadspin is not the Pulitzer Prize, we realize, but given the tone and identity of the Insider, it might actually be more satisfying. Deadspin readers are certainly the largest audience the Insider has ever reached, probably by a pretty wide margin.
And we have proof. Between the original tweet from Luke with a link to the story and the Deadspin story, our web traffic exploded. According to our website count, the Bonner story had received 460 reads as of 11 a.m. Monday morning, and two hours later, it was up to 2,283. By 11 a.m. Tuesday, 24 hours later, it was almost 4,700. A closer look at official analytics revealed something closer to 2,100 unique pageviews, but either way, stuff done blew up.
To the right is a screen grab of the website, with our Insider link visible in the bottom left corner – just to prove to ourselves that it happened. It did actually happen, right?
