A Year on the Wagon: Who the Hell Are You People?

Anyone who’s started an ambitious blog quickly becomes obsessed with SEO, search terms, and statistics: who’s reading, and when, and how often, and how did they find the site in the first place? For us, the past year has been no different, although with nearly 6.2 billion unique visitors a month, we’ve had to do some serious number-crunching. And after all the Ph.D.’s have been put to bed, and the supercomputers powered down, we’ve been left with one final question:

Oh my god, what kind of monsters are you fucking people?

I ask this based on a typical day of scanning the search terms that brought readers to Dadwagon. Oh, most of them are quite normal, the kinds of things that should ideally lead to a parenting blog:

• May 13, 2010, 14:50:38: “nyc should my kid go to public school“
• August 23, 2010: 14:36:27: “bugaboo big sale 2010“
• September 1, 2010: 19:49:04: “betty draper bad mom“
• November 3, 2010: 20:18:13: “life sucks with children“

Every once in a while, someone searches for a lengthy quote from “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, and comes up with my Q&A. Often, people search for subjects of our stories—Bambu, the Filipino rapper, or Jennifer Senior. And many are searches for us ‘wagoneers specifically, people trying to find out more about Theodore Ross, Nathan Thornburgh, Christopher Bonanos, and Matt Gross. That’s almost kind of nice, except when the search is for “Matt is a douche wagon.”

But a lot of them—I’m tempted to say most of them—are, um, well, different:

• January 15, 2010: 22:15:55: “do babysitters like to bang dads“
• May 6, 2010: 08:06:35: “genitals“
• May 29, 2010: 15:23:28: “michael jackson porn“
• June 20, 2010: 08:30:25: “real life stories of girls fucking their dad for father’s day” [We’re the first result! Yay!]
• June 29, 2010: 15:09:50: “father and zoo sex“
• July 1, 2010: 12:26:53: “ways to get my daughter to have sex“
• July 7, 2010: 17:23:56: “find pussy in taiwan“
• August 2, 2010: 11:36:20: “dads licking kids“
• August 2, 2010: 11:12:58: “black girl has a cake on black girls ass and another girl liks it“
• August 17, 2010: 15:21:10: “filth raunch blog“
• October 8, 2010: 20:33:31: “my daughter has the most pretty cunt i ever seen“

It’s hard to know how to feel when someone searching for “Hot sexy maids” lands on your Website about trying to get your kid into “universal” pre-K. On the one hand, I’m happy to divert the incest-seekers from gratifying their dubious desires, if only for a moment. And it doesn’t hurt that people Googling “sexy maid” have landed on Dadwagon a total of 54 times (and earning us zillions of zlotys!). On the other hand, do I really want Dadwagon to come up in a “dads licking kids” search? (Still, “filth raunch blog” I understand.)

Of course, there’s nothing we can really do about this. The Internet, after all, runs on porn. (You know about Rule 34, right?) And, you know, sometimes what seems like a disgusting perversion is really just curiosity.

Which brings me to “bibby bang,” the all-time no. 4 search term on Dadwagon. (Nos. 1 and 2 are “dadwagon” and “dad wagon”; no. 3 is “Genitals,” which as far as I can tell doesn’t produce search results that even lead here. Go figure.) Dadwagon is, in fact, the very first (and second!) result when you Google “bibby bang,” and in a neat twist, the first result is actually a story about how everyone is searching for “bibby bang.” (“Linkbait,” Theodore would call it.) It’s all very meta, and I’m quite happy about it, because it keeps random strangers coming back to Dadwagon, and earning us ever more zlotys, shekels, and rupiahs.

Wait, you still don’t know what “bibby bang” means? Try Googling it.