Wow. I expected a spike in traffic after the Flash appeared on last night’s Smallville, but I wasn’t expecting a three-fold increase!

It’s all on the Flash site — no sign of spillover onto this blog, for instance — but Bart Allen’s 15 minutes of fame have propelled him to the #3 spot (right after the Teen Titans and Raven).

With luck I answered people’s questions about the Flash, Bart Allen, and just who is faster in a race between the Flash and Superman. With more luck, some of them will be intrigued enough to come back. With even more luck, some of them will pick up the comic to see what they’re missing.

Web server traffic graph showing 3x increase on October 20
Daily traffic for Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (October 2004)

The small bar on the 21st is there because the graph is updated at 4:00 AM, so it always shows 4 hours of that morning’s traffic. The pages/files/hits distinction is that files also includes images, scripts, stylesheets, etc. and hits includes all requests, including reloads, 404s, and so on.

The last time I saw this big a change in traffic was the sudden jump in hits to Linda Park (the Flash’s wife) in 2001, when casting for Enterprise was announced with a then-unknown actress with the same name. I saved a picture of the search terms graph. I’ll have to see if I can find it.

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