If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been making a lazy, extremely unscientific study of the word “machka”, a seemingly humble Bulgarian word that has taken on a heightened significance as Rusev’s rallying cry and chief buzzword. My post a few months ago called On the Progress of Machka and Its Relevance in Wrestling Theory laid out a hodge-podge of graphs and whatnot to show what happened to traffic on this site’s posts about Rusev’s Bulgarian words when Rusev made “Rusev MACHKA” his Twitter name, started a #MACHKA hashtag, and when Lana suggested at Extreme Rules that everybody “google ‘machka'”.
Things eventually leveled out at a new normal of 100-200 hits a day, with larger spikes for RAW’s and pay-per-views. This month, however, we’re on track for the highest traffic month ever! And it’s all because Rusev put “MACHKA” on the waistband of his shorts. In bold type, transliterated from “МАЧКА” into Latin letters so everybody can recognize it and see the word clearly, and they’ve been googling it with renewed urgency every time he’s on the screen. Look:
After the wild frenzy of MACHKA searches associated with Rusev making “machka” such an integral part of his gimmick and twitter account, things had settled down into a new normal of 100-200 hits on average days, with larger spikes for days with RAW’s and pay-per-views. Then suddenly, Rusev wore the MACHKA shorts. September 26 & 27 are where the chart recorded Clash of Champions, the first time (the pay-per-view was actually the 25th, but WordPress stats starts the next day at 4pm in my timezone). There were 2,504 and 1,921 hits on those days, respectively. Then look at the RAW after that, recorded on Oct. 4: 2,968 hits! This was the best day of traffic ever for this site. Subsequent RAW days have seen daily hit counts of 1,528 and as of this morning, 1,267. It’s October 18 and we have 9,706 hits for the month, making this already the second best month of all time, showing signs that it may beat the the month that topped 14,000 due to Clash of Champions. Feast on the chart of monthly traffic:
The lesson learned from this phase of wrestling linguistics: “MACHKA” on the shorts is best for business.
Photo Credit: wwe.com
Sidebar, but mačka (very close in pronunciation to machka) is Slovak for cat, which should be utterly unsurprising given the large overlap among Slavic languages. I kept wondering where I heard that word every time Rusev appeared on screen , and I was transported to my childhood hearing my Bruno Sammartino-mark grandmother yelling, “Yoy! Get that mačka out of the house!”