Optics and Exposure

EDIT: When migrating this post to my new blog, I lost a few of the pictures used below to illustrate what’s going on.  I think you can still get the gist of what I’m saying from the text, though.

A few months ago, I took this photo…

Nothing special. But I thought it was funny how someone had written ‘Pee Hole’ on that valve. I laughed. I showed it to a few people. They laughed. That’s it.

What’s surprising to me is how popular this photo is. A few weeks ago, while checking out my statistics on flickr, I noticed that the photo had over 300 views. It’s my second most viewed photo, and it’s simply a snapshot of some graffiti. What’s going on? It wasn’t like I put the photo in a butt load of groups and spammed a bunch of discussions with links to it. I shared it was about a dozen people, and never expected it to get past 20 or 30 views. When I looked at the photos stats, I saw a trend. The photo below shows the daily hit count for the last month. This is almost 6 months after the photo was posted…

It’s not that it’s getting a huge surge of hits or anything, what’s funny is that it’s always getting a hit. Every day I get at least 1 or 2, and this has been happening constant since the day I put it up, 6 months ago. Why is this photo so consistently popular?

The answer….look at the referrals.

Not surprisingly, it’s coming from web searches. But, what are people searching for…who could possibly be looking for this random snapshot of some graffiti?

I’ve tracked this every day over the past month or so and the search terms are always some variant of “pee hole”, “pee hole pictures” or “pee hole photos”.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Every single day, there is at least one person out there on the interweb who is looking for photos of a “pee hole”…and they’re usually taken to this photo.

I feel dirty.

-aigulf