Montana and Wyoming Love Weird News, Science Says

We don't completely understand these numbers, but according to recent traffic data, it appears that you, our loyal Weird News readers, are outdoing yourselves.
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Montana and Wyoming, thank you.

We don't completely understand these numbers, but according to recent traffic data, it appears that you, our loyal Weird News readers, are outdoing yourselves.

Bravo! Now let us explain.

The Huffington Post Weird News page experienced the greatest spike in Bit.ly traffic for the month of January compared to any other Huff Post article. Bit.ly is a program that, among other functions, predicts how much traffic a web page will generate and, for one glorious month, the Weird News site demolished those expectations.

Where in the world was the highest concentration of this gained traffic, you might ask? Montana and Wyoming, says Forbes.

"Weird News is a great portion of what they are reading there... they love it at a greater rate than the national average," Jon Bruner, the site's data editor told Huff Post.

Awesome!

To be clear, this doesn't mean that these two states and their approximate combined population of 1.5 million people are sending billions of clicks to Weird News (Get it together, guys). Bit.ly is only aware of visits generated by its own links.

What it does mean is that even though Bit.ly didn't expect much, you came out clicking, anyway.

Why is this? Bruner has a few educated guesses -- the spike could be the result of a "taste-maker's" shared link that just stuck -- but we're going with this idea: nobody knows.

Perhaps folks in Montana and Wyoming just love strange animals? Perhaps state governments are pushing more tax dollars toward dethroning Florida's legendary status as most bizarre state? Or maybe they just know quality writing when they see it.

DISCLAIMER: Huff Post Weird News is fully aware that this difficult to explain traffic spike is likely just that and not much more. Nevertheless, Montana and Wyoming, we salute you.

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