I have now done this gag across four websites for 10 years, a time period in which the sweaty behavior I sought to skewer has morphed from a cynical attempt to ride, remora-like, on the prodigious belly of Google search traffic into an almost quaint, bygone phenomenon. It's not so much that publications across digital and traditional media are any less determined to degrade themselves in search of traffic, as it is that "digital media" and "traffic" are themselves largely bygone relics. I am almost nostalgic!
But only almost! That belly remains surfable, and plenty of news outlets are still determined to surf it. Perhaps as media literacy declines and as social media's utility as a news scraper craters, the public's thirst for knowledge—at least about one specific thing: what time the Super Bowl starts—can only be quenched by conducting a Google search. The funniest thing here is that the first result for any such search is a Google-generated box with the start time and the team logos, negating the primary utility of these sorts of posts.
Which is why they are as stuffed as possible, now, with information about the halftime performer, the host city, how people can watch the game, and basically any other even tangentially related fact that can pad a word count. Sports Illustrated even listed the start time in every time zone around the world, which, as a former high school scofflaw, I can only respect. Maybe this works; even the New York Times got in on the fun this year. Perhaps a possible future for digital media can be found in the rapid WTDTSBS-ification of everything!
Probably not, but here's who made moves this year. Many outlets choose to post and update a handful of times, which makes the updates somewhat difficult to track. All times Eastern; time stamps are as accurate as I could find from the source code.
- Sports Illustrated: January 24, 6:29 p.m.
- NFL.com: January 24, 10:04 p.m.
- Sports Illustrated: January 29, 3:53 p.m.
- USA Today: January 30, 6:04 p.m.
- Yahoo Sports: January 30, 8:38 a.m.
- Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: February 3, 3:36 p.m.
- Fox Sports: February 4, 2:25 p.m.
- Sports Illustrated: February 4, 2:28 p.m.
- NFL.com: February 4, 9:44 p.m.
- Indianapolis Star: February 5, 3:02 a.m.
- USA Today: February 5, 6:05 a.m.
- DAZN: February 5, 10:00 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 6, 2:55 a.m.
- The Oklahoman: February 6, 3:10 a.m.
- Al Jazeera: February 6, 6:35 a.m.
- Los Angeles Times: February 6, 7:35 a.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 6, 10:03 a.m.
- Sky Sports: February 6, 10:22 a.m.
- Los Angeles Times: February 6, 1:52 p.m.
- Screen Rant: February 7, 6:15 a.m.
- Axios: February 7, 6:20 a.m.
- Guardian: February 7:00 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 7, 8:15 a.m.
- Talk Sport: February 7, 9:48 a.m.
- Literally the New York Times: February 7, 10:35 a.m.
- NPR: February 7, 11:46 a.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 7, 12:00 p.m.
There were also a lot of stories about what time the Puppy Bowl started, and I find Rolling Stone's the most embarrassing of the bunch, so I'm going to link to theirs.
