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Mysterious clown boosts weekly’s website hits

A weekly newspaper has seen its website hits soar after a mysterious clown appeared in the town.

The Northampton Herald & Post saw its web hits for the weekend rise to more than 300,000 after a clown appeared in several locations, posing once a night for photos in Northampton.

This led to reporters Annabel Howard and Nick Bieber, who was on his first day at the title, going on a late night clown hunt after a photo on Twitter showed him posing in a street.

The clown has his own Facebook page, Spot Northampton Clown, and his own Twitter hashtag #northamptonclown.

Editor Steve Scoles said: “It’s just incredible how much interest there has been in this story. I think it’s a really good thing for Northampton.

“And it’s absolutely the sort of thing that Northampton residents love and it shows the sort of quirky characters we have in our town.”

Said Nick: “It’s my first day at the Herald and it couldn’t have gone better. The past 24 hours have been surreal.”

Annabel added: “It’s crazy to think that of all the stories to be on a late-night manhunt it was to find a clown!”

The paper normally has a target for weekend web hits of less than 2,000 but had more than 300,000 this weekend because of interest in the clown.

Its original story about the clown was liked on Facebook 73,000 times and retweeted more than 3,000 times.

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  • September 17, 2013 at 9:25 am
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    Will HTFP ever get its web terminology right? Time and time again you keep using ‘web hits’ when I assume you mean page views. They are two very different things.

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  • September 17, 2013 at 7:05 pm
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    Hey all you guys seeing the Clown …….
    Well don’t you know that everything floats down here????

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