Attractive profile pictures and hubpages

Briefly after noticing the Hot Indian Mallu Aunties phenomenon, which you may read about here (you can find pictures too! ;) -

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-many-views-will-HOT-INDIAN-MALLU-AUNTIES-will-get-me

I noticed another interesting phenomenon. I was going about my day, writing my hubs and decided to check my google analytics. To my great joy, I noticed quite a nice surge in views! After jumping up and down and telling myself that I truly must be the next Jane Austen (hey, give me a break - a couple hundred views a day is quite a victory to some of us), I decided to have a closer look at my google analytics data again.

That was when I suddenly realized that perhaps I may not be the next Jane Austen, rather I may just have been attracting some views based on my profile picture. Why do I feel that way, you may ask. Well, http://hubpages.com/profile/Sasinib had the most views with a 0% bounce rate. This is not to say that I did not attract more views to my other hub pages - they definitely increased too, especially the ones that were shown on my profile page. So I decided to go and have a better look at my profile picture. Oh great - my score (a proud 94 as of now) was conveniently covering my strapless top. Yes, Ladies and Gentleman - I now have a magical view generating profile picture that could be classified as "implied nude." Classy.

So, I decided to conduct an experiment. Here are the details, the procedure and the results of the experiment that I conducted. Now I realize that every condition is not going to be similar, but you get the idea.

Hypothesis

Sexy profile pictures attract more attention and more views on hubpages over non-sexy ones, provided that the number of hubs and the activity levels are the same.

Procedure

No new hubs were written during the duration of this experiment.

This was a four day experiments, on days 1 and 3, picture no. 1 was used as the subject's profile picture. One days 2 and 4, picture no, 2 was used as the subject's profile picture.

The total views, the percentage of time spent on the profile page and the bounce rate was noted.

Results

On days 2 and 4, where the picture no. 2 was used, there were about 2% of total views spent on the profile page.

On days 1 and 3, where the picture no. 1 was used, there were about 25% of total views spent on the profile page. The views on the actual hubs were almost double the views of those on days 2 and 4.

Conclusion

Sexy pictures will get you far in life, even in hubpages.

Sources of Error

For the control, a non-sexy picture of a face should have been used. People are attracted to faces anyway, so it may be that people just liked the fact that there was a face rather than a cliche landscape. But I am sure that a sexy picture would attract more views than a non-sexy picture.