“After reviewing the number of hits top local stories at his newspaper’s Web site got in 2005, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat concludes today, ‘As I look back at the year in news, it’s clear I should have focused more on people having sex with horses.’ Indeed, four of the most-clicked stories on the Web site this year, including the No. 1 finisher (’by far’), had to do with the same incident: the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in nearby Enumclaw… ‘In fact, the No. 1 horse sex story may have been ‘the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history. I don’t know whether to ignore this alarming factoid or to embrace it…’ But this may all be highly misleading. E&P also ran a Web story on the horse incident last summer, focusing, of course, on how the local press handled this seamy story, and it, too, proved to be massively popular. But as with the Seattle Times’ No. 1 piece — and unmentioned in Westneat’s column — the major reason for the traffic spike was a link on the outrageously popular Drudge Report Web site. In other words, this was not our core audience — and in the case of the Seattle paper, not their core audience either. In fact, it wasn’t even ‘local’ but national and international. After analyzing Web traffic, we discovered that the E&P story was also picked up on various fetish and humor sites, and this no doubt happened with the Times’ story as well… editors need to analyze where traffic is coming from before jumping to conclusions on what a core audience really wants. Besides, how many horse sex death cases can you count on?” — Editor And Publisher (US)

To join the crowd, PervScan also featured the Enumclaw horse sex story, and here too it proved to be astonishingly popular — “popular” in a quantitative sense (the number of people who read it), not necessarily a qualitative sense (the number of people who enjoyed it). It’s hard to be imagine anyone really enjoyed the thought of a man being fucked to death by a horse.

That being said, this analysis of the story’s popularity is somewhat absurd. True, most web sites will have a core constituency of readers. And it’s also true that it can be helpful to know what stories are most popular with that constituency. For example, the Seattle Times would probably not do well with those core readers were it to start selling ad space to bestiality web sites.

On the other hand, this is the internet. Your “core” group is likely to explode, ramify, and mutate with each story you publish. Local papers have been especially slow to learn this. Many sites for local papers don’t even list the state they’re located in — a fact which shows they have no idea how the internet operates. Online the jurisdiction of a story is not defined by geography but rather by the story’s intrinsic interest. The horse-sex story demonstrates that perfectly. It had universal appeal.

And that’s really the disturbing thing about it. Why were so many people interested to read about a man who liked taking a horse cock up the ass? Is it just because, at a time when the outrageous has become the norm, this story so surpassed everything else in sheer freakishness? Did it simply outscore every other news story on the shockometer? Or are there even deeper, weirder impulses at work?

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