Two Weeks into the Scandal
On February 2nd the website “Monica Lewinsky Ate My Balls” was fully equipped with photos, T-shirt sales, jokes, chat, and ads for long distance service. The webmaster said “the site was getting 15,000 hits per day and has been growing steadily.” Fan mail had come in including an E-mail from Rodney Dangerfield who said “he enjoyed the site.”
A new 24-hour chat room “All Clinton, all the time” opened at: http://www.citynews.com/chats.html. The site boasted that “new developments are happening all the time so just tune in this chat and leave it on to get the latest. No special software - no Java, no Active-x - is required for this Chat Room - an ordinary web browser is all you need.” DejaNews came on strong and search for newsgroups postings showed that Monica Lewinsky was certainly popular in the electronic gossip forums with over 7,000 messages posted by February 5th.
Traffic at the Drudge Report dipped to 195,000 on February 5th down from its peak on January 26th of 350,000 hits. However hits at the Drudge Report steadied and remained high, over 200,000 per day.
On February 6th the Excite search engine went off the charts at 2,300+ Monica Lewinsky entries. This is very strange considering that on February 5th it had dropped down to two entries from the steady 25 it had been at for days. New Monica Lewinsky websites kept appearing including:
Monica Lewinsky’s search engine stats continued to grow with one exception. A search of the Infoseek search engine resulted in only five entries early on February 12th and by mid day the searches produced no results. Was this a natural occurrence or did Infoseek go chicken on the scandal? The Infoseek public relations person admitted operator error blew the Monica entries out and they would re-spider the sites. By 6:30 P.M. EST Infoseek had recovered their indexing and was showing 3,190+ entries on Monica Lewinsky. The email response form Infoseek is shown in Figure 1.
The count of newsgroups postings in DejaNews went up to 9,630 on February 12th up from the 7,000 messages posted on February 5th. The Excite news tracker listed 630+ newspaper articles on February 12th while NewsWorks listed 3,150 articles. A search of Associated Press via the Washington Post resulted in 903 articles. The News Index listed 430+ articles. DejaNews was showing 13,573 news groups postings on Friday February 27th.
Newsbeat Trading Cards, a Minneapolis-based company, announced the release of its collectible trading cards memorializing the recent turmoil involving President Bill Clinton and the former White House intern. The box set was to include 40 cards of the key players and events. Newsbeat Trading Cards was accepting reservations for its Clinton-Lewinsky affair boxed set through its web site http://www.clintoncards.com or phone orders at 1-888-865-5007. The cost of the limited edition set is $14.95, plus $2.00 for shipping and handling. The website also noted that companies interested in distributing “The Clinton-Lewinsky Affair” trading cards should call 612-686-8144 or email Newsbeat.
In late February the first ten search entries in Infoseek, Alta Vista, HotBot, and Lycos all listed: Zippergate: Monica Lewinsky Scandal website http://www.btlarkin.com/monica/index.html. Other top search engine entries included:
A search was conducted of each search engine on March 7, 1998 seeking the number of sites that had both Monica and sex and to test for what portion of the total Monica websites listed were about sex. The combination of Monica Lewinsky and the word sex was dominate in two out of five search engines examine. The results are shown in Figure 2.
For several months websites listed in the search engines and the number of newsgroup postings saw relatively steady growth over the time frame with some going up and down and many just hovering around the same number. Counts for each search engine from March through September are shown in Figure 3.
