I took a bit of a pasting (or should that be basting?) on Thursday night, and it’s all the fault of Michel Roux Jr & Co.
I wrote and linked on our Facebook pagea quick articlenaming Steven as the winnerof MasterChef: The Professionals shortly after the final concluded on BBC2 at 9pm.
An obvious thing to do, and a place for people to discuss the performance of our defeated local hopefuls Adam and Scott, thought I.
“Agh! WAY too soon to post this!” thought commenter Anna. She said it was “ridiculous to post the result so quickly.”
And she was not alone.
“Thanks for spoiling it for those of us who have not seen it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” posted Arthur. (That’s how many exclamation marks he used. I counted them.)
“Thanks for that I haven’t had a chance to see it yet… mighty p****d off now!” added Christina. (Thanks for using asterisks Christina. It saves me doing so.)
To be fair and why be anything else? I can almost understand their point.
Nothing they posted gets anywhere near the venom I direct towards my digital video recorder when it chooses to interrupt a delayed recording to jump ahead and show me how the football match I’ve spent an hour watching “as live” actually ended.
Time-shifting is great, when it works.
So why post the article so quickly?
Well, there’s one very good reason: traffic. That graphic at the top of the page shows you what happened to our visitor numbers right on 9pm.
They rose like a well-judged souffl.
As an online editor my job is to post content people are looking for, when they are looking for it.
And MasterChef has been the gift that keeps on giving for us these last few weeks.
It’s provided us with more than 40,000 pageviews as we’ve updated the progress of our local hopefuls week by week.
Every time MasterChef has been shown we’ve seen a spike in traffic to our growing library of articles.
This content even prompted Adam Handling’s dad to leave a comment and thereby help us answer the questions that were on everyone’s lips: where in Scotland is Adam from, and is he actually Andy Murray disguised in a fancy white jacket?
So sorry Anna, Arthur, Christina and the rest.
While in an ideal world we’d be able to wait an hour, two hours, three hours or however long until you have watched it and given us the green light, we needed to catch Mr Google’s eye when he was looking for the newest MasterChef articles to serve to a hungry internet public.
As another commenter put it, the only way to avoid a spoiler is to watch live or keep off Facebook.