Month in Review: January

Team D's Asters

D's Asters (Team 8) takes an early lead!

With all the points collected and tabulated, the team ranks are as follows:

D's Asters (Team 8): 66 points
Farticles (Team 4): 61 points
50 Shades of Wiki (Team 3): 54 points
The Google, The Veto, and the Mr. Mom (Team 6): 52 points

Giant Clam (Team 1): 32 points

Hot Chicks & Jesus (Team 2): 32 points
Wiki Wiki What?! (Team 7): 22 points
E-Cigs in Space (Team 5): 18 points

Details for each team are available by clicking on the new team pages. So, what exactly happened this month?

U.S. Politics: As expected, it was a big month for U.S. politics. After the GOP regained the Senate, everyone watched to see if Mitch McConnell and John Boehner could cooperate with President Barack Obama. The President launched some early previews of his State of the Union address (which Ruth Bader Ginsburg slept through), and the Koch brothers announced a massive budget for the 2016 presidential election. All this added up for big pageviews for Mitch McConnell (+15), Democratic Party (United States) (+2), Republican Party (United States) (+3), Barack Obama (+8), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (+15), Koch Industries (+10), and John Boehner (+8).

Golden Globe awards: A few articles in the entertainment category scored big. Expect these articles to see continued increased pageviews through February. These are the articles for the Best Actor frontrunner, Michael Keaton (+15), and the articles for two Best Actress nominees, Julianne Moore (+8) and Reese Witherspoon (+8). Last, the film "The Theory of Everything" has led to continued high pageviews for its subject, Stephen Hawking (+15).

Oil: Low oil prices have driven up pageviews for some related articles, like OPEC (+15) and Petroleum (+3), ExxonMobil (+2), but not for others, like Hydraulic Fracturing (-1).

New movies: With the release of "American Sniper," "Taken 3," and the anticipated releases of the films "Jurassic World" and "Fifty Shades of Grey," some related pages have had more pageviews: Fifty Shades of Grey (+15), Jurassic Park (+15), Clint Eastwood (+10), and Liam Neeson (+15). The Google, The Veto, and the Mr. Mom had the closest call this week: if Clint Eastwood had 5 more pageviews, it would have increased its January 2014 to January 2015 pageviews to 60% instead of the 59.997% that actually happened. 60% is the threshold between 10 points and 15 points, so just 5 pageviews would have given 5 more points, enough to push The Google, The Veto, and the Mr. Mom into 3rd place.

Other news events: A few other events can be tracked to increased pageviews: both Angela Merkel (+4) and Pope Francis (+15) were highly visible after the Charlie Hebdo events. Fox News Channel (+10) got an increase in pageviews around the time it apologized for comments on Muslims in England and France. Others beyond Charlie Hebdo are Kim Jong-Un (+10), Lithuania (+4), Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (+15), Google (+15), Quantitative Easing (+15), Israel (+4), and Ebola (+15).

Unknown: I haven't been following these as closely, or I don't know the cause of their increased pageviews: Tesla Motors (+10), Stephen Colbert (+8), Bank (+8), and Taylor Swift (+10).