Some facts first. Dave Sifry (CEO of Technorati) recently posted about growth in the blogosphere. 19.6 million blogs. If I checked the Technorati ranking of my blog here, it has been somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000. That’s in about the top 0.002 or 0.2% of all blogs and took about nine months. Additionally, this blog has a very modest following of probably 50ish readers via Feedburner RSS (still some renegade feeds out there) and 20,000 some page views since inception.
Of course, blogging is about microaudiences, the long tail, etc., etc. so expectations from the average person that they will get huge audiences is probably against the odds/base rates unless they are really targeting a niche segment.
The highest number of comments I received on a blog post on my individual blog here (including my own comments) was seven comments. It was a post linked to from Virginia Postrel’s site.
In contrast, at my BusinessWeek blog (which has only been around for about a month and has ten posts) … well I have twenty comments on a post I did there (including my own comments) on ethics – the comments include many more people in the discussion.
A key difference in my blog at BusinessWeek is that my blog is part of a blog community, as opposed to being an individual blog (like the one here) that sits out on an island connecting to context and other users. Of course, another key difference is that the blog there leverages from the BusinessWeek reader base.
But I keep coming back to this … nine months on individual blog with seven comments as a high versus one
month and ten posts on blog as part of blog community with twenty
comments as high. Which method had a better efficiency in creating
dialogue? Just stepping back at a very crude level, the blog as part of a blog community seems to win out.
One could make many other arguments that I have not controlled for factors that level balance the two blogs. Nor I have sought out disconfirming evidence to explain the difference.
But I wonder whether blog use as we know it will shift given the stats and observations I’ve made above. For me, individual blogging has been a substitute for a electronic newsletter. But is it really that way for the majority of people? Is it more about conversations? If a community framework provides a better way to generate that dialogue, should we see more of this?
Disclosure: I am a gun for 21Publish, a provider of turnkey group and branded blog communities. BusinessWeek is a 21Publish customer.
Update (10/19/05): The comparison is nine months and 300 posts (individual blog) versus one month and 10 posts (blog community).
You do have a point, I started out 8 months ago and I just broke 10,000 visitors last week. I have had more comments than seven, the most I had was 33; but some posts have zero comments (once you’ve deleted the spam). My readership has gone from one or two friends to now all over the country and even overseas. I probably would have more if I joined some type of community, but so far I haven’t found one that really appeals to me. So with the exception of blogrolls and some cross blogging here and there I probably will remain solo.
I’d rather have a small number of regular commenters that in itself is almost a community. I have found though that the majority of people that visit don’t comment for some reason, yet you can track that they have visted before.
Lisa,
Thanks for commenting. I am actually surprised that there are not more natural forces surrounding the organization of blog communities around politics. Although not exactly the same thing, group blogs definitely seem to draw more traffic than do individual blogs in the political space. Of course, the political sector has not been a personal focus of mine, and I don’t have many data points to conclude anything, but the general observation strikes me as odd. Maybe it has to do with the case that there is a lot of inertia in that sector and that there is already a lot of online dialogue going on with “communities” centered around individuals or the group political blogs.
Also good point about people visiting but not commenting. That is also serving value which is not measured here.
I was just surprised to experience firsthand as a blog user in the BusinessWeek community that the difference in amount of comments would be so stark.