After Miley Cyrus' controversial performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, New York magazine explored data to determine what American were most interested in reading about. The results? They were 12 times more curious about twerk-gate than about the conflict in Syria, Mediaite reports.
Mocking the priorities of the average American news consumer is the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but an item on New York Magazine's The Cut blog takes the pastime to extremes, asserting that "Americans Were 12 Times More Interested in Miley Cyrus Than Syria" in the days surrounding Cyrus' much-publicized twerk-off at the MTV Video Music Awards. Maybe, but another data set from that time period suggests that Americans were also very, very interested in Syria.
The Cut's Maureen O'Connor explains something called "Outbrain," which generates related links for websites like CNN's and Fox News', and collects traffic data which showed that:
In the three days surrounding Miley's VMA performance and the Obama administration signaling its willingness to bomb Syria, Outbrain's network generated 8,104 stories about the former and 19,568 about the latter. The day after the VMAs, Miley Cyrus stories accounted for 12 percent of total U.S. page views, while Syria stories accounted for 1 percent.
Interest in the starlet significantly outpaced Syria in England, Australia, France, Germany, and every other nation in Outbrain's analysis — except Israel and Russia. Globally, Miley Cyrus stories generated eight times as many page views as Syria did in the days surrounding the VMAs.
Read more at Mediaite.