TNL.net

Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Lots of short entries

24th
7

A cou­ple of weeks ago, when work­ing on the entry about salaries for blog­gers, I did a quick analy­sis of the entries in a day slice. Many peo­ple pointed out that this was a small slice and was not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what other blogs where doing. From there, I ended up with two ques­tions basi­cally bug­ging me: first, how many entries does the aver­age blog pro­duce on a daily basis? Sec­ond, what is the size of those entries? To answer the ques­tion, I decided to start ana­lyz­ing the A-list of the blog world.

Method to the madness

The first thing in prepar­ing for this analy­sis was to fig­ure out who I should pick as a sub­ject for the study. That was the easy part, as Tech­no­rati, the blog­ging search engine, is gen­er­ous enough to pro­vide a Top 100 list, high­light­ing the super­stars of the blog­ging world.

Sit­ting at the top of the list were the fol­low­ing blogs:

I decided to elim­i­nate Fark from my analy­sis as it was the out­lier, gen­er­ally not pro­duc­ing more than four or five words per link and not sep­a­rat­ing entries but rather keep­ing every­thing in one page, mak­ing it look very dif­fer­ent from the reg­u­lar blog for­mat. Hav­ing done so, I decided to pick a 24 hour cycle and ana­lyze data from that cycle for the remain­ing five blogs. The day I picked, May 19th, was a good day for gad­get news and polit­i­cal blogs: in the gad­get space, the E3 show was clos­ing down. Mean­while, the poten­tial of a dra­matic show­down in the Amer­i­can con­gress made for a lot of mate­r­ial for polit­i­cal bloggers.

I waited until the day was com­pleted to start my research. Pick­ing every entry one by one, I cut the entry out, pasted it on Microsoft Word, did a word count on the entry, and recorded the num­ber in an Excel spreadsheet.

So let’s take a look at the numbers:

  Boing Boing InstaPun­dit Daily Kos Giz­modo EnGad­get
1 120 175 202 77 13
2 136 75 105 115 118
3 247 3 2 67 147
4 145 10 4 107 78
5 94 48 171 133 151
6 62 33 297 131 111
7 67 6 7 102 171
8 196 11 159 134 101
9 67 27 785 135 111
10 101 25 527 225 85
11 294 13 231 99 85
12 165 9 316 98 152
13 50 691 401 104 101
14 64 60 130 92 103
15 32 16 892 90 88
16 111 24 352 59 114
17 202 50 201 82 174
18 283 71 470 129 210
19 50 11 391 121 122
20 49 15 2 49 204
21 32 864 642 81 94
22 32 249 647 97 68
23 40 22 47 69 113
24 23 10 245   86
25 42 9 238   127
26 68 254     119
27 42 334     99
28 56 169     106
29 72 33     65
30 151       104
31         830
32         114
33         69
34         353
35         147
36         58
37         127
38         158
39         95
40         209

A cur­sory look at this shows a lot of inter­est­ing data. For starters, all the A list blog­gers in that group posted at a rate of an entry per hour or more. How­ever, look­ing at this, it was unclear how long each entry was.

I decided to mas­sage the data a bit. Indi­vid­ual entry data did not pro­vide much in the way of a clear view but aggre­gated infor­ma­tion did give me a clearer pic­ture. Let’s take a look:

  Boing Boing InstaPun­dit Daily Kos Giz­modo EnGad­get Aver­age Total
Daily Total 3093 3317 7464 2396 5580 4370 21850
# of entries 30 29 25 23 40 29.4 147
Aver­age words/entry 103.1 114.37931 298.56 104.173913 139.5 148.639456  

The data became clearer. On that par­tic­u­lar day, the top five blog­gers cre­ated an aver­age of 30 entries, with each entry being under 150 words. This reminds me of some­thing Phillip Green­spun, another A-list blog­ger, had said about why he liked blogs:

It allows me to exper­i­ments with the three para­graph form

Con­sid­er­ing the size of the aver­age entry from this, it seems very clear that an entry should be brief.

How­ever, going beyond that is the num­ber of entries that come in on a day. Look­ing at this, the aver­age Top 5 A-list blog­ger wrote an aver­age of almost 30 entries. Think about it for a sec­ond or two. 30 entries! It’s a huge num­ber for a sin­gle day.

From the reader standpoint

So let’s say you popped up your news aggre­ga­tor of choice and have sub­scribed to each of those blogs. How much would you read? How much infor­ma­tion would you get? Our lit­tle analy­sis shows you would have read a bit under 22,000 words. That would amount, in terms of printed pages, to 44 sin­gle spaced pages.

Your alter­na­tive? Well, on that day, you could have picked up the New York Times and read every sto­ries on the front page. That would have net­ted you 12,964 words, or about 22 sin­gle spaced printed pages. You could have lis­tened to the evening news, are about 3000 more words. Ulti­mately, you would have con­sumed more words read­ing blogs than going with main­stream media: 5 TV shows would have net­ted you about 15,000 words. 5 news­pa­per sto­ries (assum­ing a dif­fer­ent report on each story) would have net­ted you about 8,000 words. So blogs are much more pro­lific in terms of words.

Blog­ger burn out

Notice that I’ve care­fully avoided the sub­ject of qual­ity in this par­tic­u­lar analy­sis. This seems to be an increas­ing issue in the blog­ging world. Some blog­gers, like Joi Ito and Fred Wil­son are start­ing to worry about the qual­ity of entries. Is this the onset of a rush to more sub­stan­tial but less fre­quent posts? Only time will tell.

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7 Comments

  1. 1Link Love — September 5, 2010 at 9:31 pm

    A num­ber of blog­gers argue that a high num­ber of short posts will bring you suc­cess in get­ting more traf­fic from the search engines. Problog­ger and tnl. It makes sense. As when­ever you cre­ate a new post, you essen­tially cre­ate a new page with a catch­ing title, as long as you put the right key­words in the title which appear in the url! Now my fre­quency of post­ing is already pretty high, but it will

  2. 2Of Interest — September 5, 2010 at 9:31 pm

  3. 3Succes Dublu — July 3, 2006 at 12:33 am

    Con­form unui studiu

  4. 4Transient Thoughts — August 27, 2006 at 6:51 am

    First off, this is the Inter­net equiv­a­lent of Hol­ly­wood Gos­sip, which is quite an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non. These geeks writ­ing blogs in their paja­mas from home, are becom­ing some sort of quasi celebri­ties. You can find many men­tions of A-list blog­gers out there which is the equiv­a­lent in Geekville (oth­er­wise known as Sil­i­con Val­ley) to A-list actors in Hol­ly­wood. I love it! And sec­ond, this type of thing really shows how the Inter­net is break­ing down doors to a very open world. It’s

  5. 5Secrets of the A-Listers - The ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog — September 26, 2006 at 11:07 am

    […] Jason Cain (aka Gold­blog­ger) gave me a link to an inter­est­ing arti­cle titled Secrets of the A-Listers. While this arti­cle was writ­ten a year and a half ago (May 2005), it’s inter­est­ing nonetheless… […]

  6. 6Yippy kay eh — June 1, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    From look­ing around the inter­net, it appears there are two ways to blog. Blog lit­tle and often or blog less with more. So what are the top dogs doing out there at the moment, and how do they keep their read­ers? I’ve come across this arti­cle writ­ten a cou­ple of years ago at tnl.net. It’s an analy­sis of the top blogs at the time by the num­ber of posts for a sin­gle day bro­ken down into the words for each post. Good idea so here’s an updated version.

  7. 7Angdry — October 22, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    Inter­est­ing research but I think one-man-blogs should be taken into account because those blogs are col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ings which can­not be equal one to another.

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