Why I'm Hesitant to Blog on April Fool's Day

For many large sites, playing a well executed April Fool's prank can be a source of much appreciated buzz and welcomed traffic. But for many others the day does nothing but create major headaches.

Let me illustrate this with the help of two examples. The first is TechCrunch's acquisition of Fu-kedCompany, which got 331 inbound links. And the second one is Matt Cutts' website getting hacked by the Dark SEO Team which also got hundreds of inbound links and was covered all over the blogosphere (including thousands in traffic from Digg).

msaleem_aprilfoolheadache.png

While this is great for the prank-playing sites, it creates a lot of headaches for other bloggers (primarily those that cover industries and news). Not only do you have to keep second-guessing yourself as to whether a news item is a prank or actual news (and if you should blog about it or not) but if you do end up blogging about something, you have to continuously monitor the blogopshere to see if you made the right call.

Take, for example, the new media news blog 901am which covered both the first and the second prank. The author of both posts took the pranks on face value and blogged about them as fact, only to later update the first entry (the second one still hasn't been updated).

If you run an industry coverage or news-related blog, your readers look towards you to filter the junk and report on what's most important. My advice to you? Next year, take April Fool's Day off and watch other people get fooled instead. Not only will you make your readers happy, but you will also maintain your site's integrity.

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SMX

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Reader Comments (7)

Christopher Finke, April 2, 2007

Great commentary, Muhammad. The worst is when people try and be clever by pulling their April Fools day pranks early - before April even comes around. TechCrunch made their announcement on March 31, wasting a lot of people's time, since nobody expects outright lies from a company on any day other than April 1.

MG Siegler, April 2, 2007

I tried to keep people updated as I stumbled upon things so they wouldn't be fooled.

http://tinyurl.com/2sqnfm

But then the early reports about the Apple and EMI DRM-Free deal broke and I wasn't sure whether that was another prank or not...

Michael Wales, April 2, 2007

This is why I chose to only cover a few stories on April Fools Day and for the most part they were stories I knew were jokes and I made the post as late in the day as was reasonable. The only one I am unsure of is Yahoo Underground.

See my April Fools Day post at http://www.betaflow.com/2007/04/april-fools-web-20-style/

Jean Biri, April 2, 2007

In my case, I did not even follow any news because I got punked twice and got overly suspicious to the extent where I just had to give up.

Thank goodness this year, it fell on a Sunday a typically slow news day.

Stan Schroeder, April 3, 2007

The F**kedcompany thing was just a blatantly obvious attempt by Techcrunch to get some Google search love for porn-related terms (:.

Paula Mooney, April 3, 2007

I totally agree, Muhammad. Totally agree.

Erik Sebellin-Ross, April 3, 2007

Spot on perfect summation of my own fears. You just can't take anything that happens on that day at face value and it makes a news junkie and busy blogger like me nuts. I could spend hours crafting a blog entry only to have people think it's a joke? Hm.