The Coming Week: 1/18/15-1/24/15

Articles of the Week: Quantitative Easing and Barack Obama

Article: Quantitative Easing

Category: Geography, Politics, Religion, and History

Owner: E-Cigs in Space (Team 5)

Pageviews in January 2014: 68,083

What's coming: This week, the European Central Bank may adopt the policy of "quantitative easing" to increase the Euro's worryingly low rate of inflation. I'll be honest, I don't understand it much more than that. I would check Wikipedia to understand it better, but I'm trying to avoid Fantasy Wikipedia articles until the competition ends in April. For a timeline of quantitative easing in the United States since 2008, check here.

The governing council that makes this decision meets this coming Thursday, January 22. I expect that a decision on the policy either way will make headlines and cause people to scramble to Wikipedia to understand what's going on. If that happens, expect a big bump in pageviews for Quantitative Easing. That would be a much-needed help for E-Cigs in Space (Team 5), currently 8th place in the competition. 

Article: Barack Obama

Category: Geography, Politics, Religion, and History

Owner: Farticles (Team 4); currently "benched"
Pageviews in January 2014: 595,065

What's coming: This Tuesday (January 20), President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union to Congress. While this is an event that happens every year, there's reason to expect that it will be more important in 2015 than it was in 2014. The President has already been making a domestic tour to "preview" this year's speech. The New York Times reports that some of the issues that the President will speak on are higher education, housing, and jobs.

The article Barack Obama is owned by Farticles (Team 4), and currently sits on his "bench." Each month, team owners need to state that 2 of their 10 articles are inactive, not eligible for points. So far this month, Barack Obama is projected to result in -1 points for Farticles, since it is projected to have less than 75% of the pageviews as it did in January 2014. Farticles is currently in the lead, so it looks like this was a good decision on his part. But last year, Barack Obama got a big bump after his State of the Union address. A bigger bump this year could put Barack Obama over last year's total, making the team owner of Farticles regretting leaving the President on the bench.