Bloggasm

Occasionally, after emailing a blogger with a suggestion or story idea, I receive a polite reply inviting me to take my message to the blogger’s comment section. Though there is definitely inherent worth within this subsection of a website, there’s no question that in terms of readership it is of lesser visibility. Mike Masnick at TechDirt lambastes the PR minions who seek out coverage within his blog posts, telling them to mix with the other commoners in his blog comments section if they want to deliver a message.

My reading habits are no indication for the blog reading public at large, but based on observation there is a small percentage of the overall readership that dives into the comments; just as a pub has its mixture of regulars and random visitors, so do most blogs. If your message or comment manages to squirm its way through the moderators and CAPTCHA traps, it will essentially remain below the “fold,” where only the most avid and loyal readers dwell. Given that many blog posts are read through an RSS feed, which renders the comments invisible, it’s unsurprising that PR flacks, wanting to claim large audience reach and influence, don’t want to resort to this method. I don’t completely blame them for not wanting to mingle with the commoners, not while the vast majority of the public are merely window shoppers, not willing to venture in and browse around.

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One waits for memos from Nick Denton because behind the updates and milestones he lists for Gawker Media you can get a glance — if you read between the lines — of his underlying assumptions about online media and its inherent worth. With such precise Internet metrics, publishers and advertisers have learned over the last few years that the emperor truly has no clothes, but Denton seems always in search of real garments with which to dress his Majesty.

Below is a memo sent to his bloggers boasting of recent pageview spikes, but with all these positive bullet points there is the addendum that page views alone are no longer going to cut it.

From: Nick Denton
Subject: Nearly!
To: edit@gawker.com
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 12:36 PM

Just a shade off 400m pageviews in November. Damn. Close. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles Times is somewhere between 100m and 200m. New York Times is about 1bn. In web traffic, we’re somewhere in between. Not bad for a bunch of scrappy bloggers!

io9 sucked those Twilight vampires dry. The scifi site continues to run at twice the traffic of this time last year. It’s now twice the size of Boing Boing, the closest competitor — a site which has been around since the beginning of the blogs. io9′s growth means that we now have not a single site under 20m pageviews a month. (The threshold of success used to be 1m!)

The ESPN controversy and other stories seem to have left Deadspin at a consistently higher level than the summer. It’s also doubled in traffic. If you needed any more evidence that scoops are rewarded, here it is. Deadspin has largely abandoned the blog filler. The site is down to 20 posts a day. But they’re damn good posts.

The other big standout: Fleshbot. The site got a boost from the Awards party at The Box — and the coverage thereof. But the Miss Universe threeway didn’t hurt either. Fleshbot had been stagnant for a couple of years. It’s now on the move again. The turnaround — and the recent performance of Gizmodo and Gawker — show that even our most established sites have plenty of potential.

One little footnote. Pageviews have been our standard measure of success. They’re easy to understand. The Sitemeter numbers update throughout the day. But we do need to recognize that not all pageviews are created equal. A slideshow view is not worth as much as a click from Twitter or Facebook or Digg which brings a new reader to us. Expect more emphasis in 2010 on clicks through from external sites — and the “uniques” which measure of the number of people that we reach. We can’t just satisfy our existing regulars; we have to recruit new ones.

So start paying more attention to this list.

Nick

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