Dan Snyder Helps Us Demonstrate The Streisand Effect In Numbers

Having coined the term "The Streisand Effect" a while back, I'm always interested in more examples of it in action. We recently talked about how Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder sued the Washington City Paper over a tongue-in-cheek article criticizing him, and the response may actually give us some Streisand Effect data. Paul Alan Levy sends over a neat blog post from Tech Cocktail that tries to quantify how much more attention was driven to the article Snyder was so upset about. The answer? An awful lot. As you can see, the article got a bunch of comments early on, and then it died out, as comments tend to do. Then the lawsuit hit. And suddenly the article got more than twice as many comments as it had accumulated up until then. And, of course, the story spread via social networking services as well:

The article garnered 554 tweets and over 7,000 Facebook (FB) likes. A quick survey of City Paper articles shows that few, if any, other articles by Mr. McKenna rate more than 5 comments, tweets or FB likes.

So by suing, Snyder helped drive a ton more traffic to the article that was critical of him. And if you think that within all that traffic some folks are agreeing with Snyder's take on things... again that doesn't appear to be the case:

Activity on the Paper’s Facebook Group has increased and is overwhelmingly supportive, as is the Twittosphere.  Sentiment towards Snyder is unanimously negative as measured by tools like Tweet Feel which at my last count showed a 100% anti-Snyder rating, well below Hosni Mubarak who came in at 67% negative.

Yeah. Perhaps next time, before suing over some minor criticism, people might take such results into account.

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