Fish doorbell visitors quadruple after John Oliver's mention on Last Week Tonight

Utrecht’s fish doorbell has seen its number of daily visitors nearly quadruple since the British-American comedian John Oliver mentioned the website on his late-night show Last Week Tonight on Monday. In the past two days, the fish doorbell’s website received around 90,000 unique visitors per day.

Visitors to the site can press a button if they see a fish in front of the Weersluis in Utrecht. That alerts to lock keeper to open the lock and let the fish swim through. Oliver mentioned the fish doorbell as a welcome distraction from the news about American politics. He had R&B singer Mario sing a song about the doorbell.

The organization behind the fish doorbell has definitely noticed the attention, Anne Nijs told NU.nl. The day after the broadcast of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the website had between 600,000 and 700,000 visits, compared to an average of around 200,000 per day in the days before. Many people visited the site more than once. The number of individual visitors reached 90,000 on Monday, compared to an average of 25,000 before that.

“Of course, you don’t need that many people to actually let the fish through,” Nijs told the newspaper. “But we like to make as many people as possible aware of fish migration and the importance of fewer barriers that we as humans have erected.”