The 10 Biggest PC World Hits of All Time

On Friday morning at 1 am San Francisco time, we quietly launched an article called The 25 Worst Products of All Time. We thought folks would like it. Actually, we thought they'd like it a lot, especially as the U.S. headed into a leisurely long weekend.

But we wouldn't have guessed that it would rack up more traffic more quickly than any article in PCWorld.com's history--which is what it's doing. (The fact that the entire blogosphere seems to be talking about it and linking to it sure helps.)

As of Sunday afternoon, total traffic (so far!) for this unassuming piece by contributing editor Dan Tynan about Products Behaving Badly makes it the #2 PCWorld.com story of all time in terms of page views, and it's closing in on the #1 spot. Before we know it, "Worst" could be first.

Which brings up the question: What are the most popular articles this site has ever seen? Here, for the record, are the top ten, ranked in order of total page views to date:

1. The 100 Best Products of 2005

2. The 25 Worst Products of All Time

3. World Class: Best of 2003

4. 20 Things They Don't Want You to Know

5. How to Buy a Laptop

6. How to Set Up Your Home Network

7. 20 Things You Didn't Know Your PC Could Do

8. The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

9. Six Windows Tweaks I Couldn't Live Without

10. 101 Fabulous Freebies

Multiple obvious patterns there--everything is a list or a how-to...or a list of how-tos. And despite the fact that people come to PC World mostly to learn about what's new and what's next, a dash of technological history doesn't hurt.

Hmmm--maybe we should do "The 50 Greatest How-Tos of the Past 50 Years..."

Comments

The 25 Worst products of all time was one of the best computer tech articles I have ever read. If it was half as much fun to write than it was to read, y'all must have had a ball.

Bob Cook

May 29, 2006

9:19 AM PT

Are the page hits based on how many times the article as a whole was viewed (1 hit per viewing), or how many times each page in the article was viewed (8 hits per one viewing)?

This is one annoying thing that online magazines and news sites are doing to "increase" traffic. Not to mention, the more pages the article spreads across, the more advertisements can be displayed, meaning more money for the company. However, it does irritate the reader.

Personally, I'd rather view one page with the entire article displayed on it.

Anonymous

May 30, 2006

9:39 AM PT

I thought the featured article showed how far we've come in the last 15 or so years...i was a pointcast user and i thought it was very useful back then since it allowed me to just scan headlines and i didn't have time to waste waiting for pages to load on dial-up..it did use alot of bandwidth though and i couldn't do anything until it was finished updating, which always annoyed me...i had to end up scaling back the quantity of content because it began to take longer and longer to complete updating, which defeated the purpose of the thing...i thought windows 98 would have made it up there..that's where i first met "the blue screen on death".if you didn't know any better you'd have thought it was a MS screen saver the way that thing would pop up so often..i literally brought my computer back from the dead many times over, thanks to that bit of software..WinMe had it's share of blue screens too but i always found it more stable than the first edition of 98 ( probably because i knew learned by then how to get trouble-free installations done each time).....and Real player was a Real pain; it kept making itself the default player even after i changed preferences settings...i was so annoyed with it that it's taken me a full 5 years to get the nerve to put it back on my system...i actually owned a 250mb iomega zip drive and it worked well for about two years and then the clicking started and i couldn't figure out what the heck was wrong with it...by then i got into cd-r technology and USB and had no need for the drive...to tell you the truth i don't even know what happened to that drive..at least now i know it was actually busted...i thought it just needed cleaning...the Apple puck mouse was a funny one...i took one look at the photo in the article and saw trouble even before i read about it...what were they thinking?

May 30, 2006

12:23 PM PT

To the anonymous writer, there's a 'printer friendly version' link at the bottom of the first page (below the related topics section) of the long articles on this website which lets you see all of the linked pages together on a single page...but your theory on the reasoning for the large number of links may well be true though...

May 30, 2006

12:37 PM PT

I'd rather see "The 50 WORST How-Tos..." Any nominations out there?

DanG

May 30, 2006

3:11 PM PT