There has been some discussion of late about who has the most visitors to their blog. I’m sure that I don’t compare to some of the participants in the discussion who, Priapus-like, wave their impressive statistics for all to see.

Google Analytics, Statcounter and the like are, ultimately, hobbyist tools. A website seeking to make money will judge its website’s success by revenue and profit, not hits. The debate around hits, views, page loads, visitors and absolutely unique visitors is a canard. Unless and until an accepted means of providing a number that is independently verifiable emerges, every mention of ‘number of visitors’ will be greeted with claim and counter-claim of bad faith. I note that no blog is releasing figures from the ABCe.

Even if that did emerge, it would not be comparable with newspaper or magazine circulations. For one thing, a newspaper produces a lot more on a daily basis than any blog; even a weekly journal produces more. While it takes a few seconds to read a blog, reading a newspaper takes longer. That has implications for brand identification, message retention and advertising revenue.

There is also the issue of seriousness and its corrollary, track record. Part of the respect accorded to (say) Anatole Kaletsky is because he has been chosen to write for a large audience. I’m not saying that’s good, but I am saying that’s how it works. Part of that is because the Times has been going for a long time and so people have an idea of what it’s talking about. Blogging in general and individual blogs in particular are too young for such associations to be made.

It is not clear what the demographic coverage of any given blog or the blogosphere as a whole might be. It’s true that anyone in the world can read a blog, but, from the point of view of an advertiser, that reduces the number of useful visitors. If you’re trying to change law x or promote brand y, a reader in Colombia can’t vote and would fall under a different geographic brand strategy. For very narrow interest blogs, that doesn’t matter - the number of people interested in naked bog-snorkelling is probably sufficiently small that naked bog-snorkelling equipment suppliers will welcome them being into one place - while the Cokes and Pepsis of this life will, as I said, be looking for a segmented strategy or can go for proven campaign strategies.

There are imagined communities of Guardian readers, Telegraph readers and so on. To a degree, there is exclusivity; while some people take a different Sunday paper, most people stick with a given paper. This isn’t quite the same for journals as, although I wouldn’t expect many readers of the New Statesman to read the Spectator, magazines like Prospect, Private Eye and perhaps the Economist spread across political lines more easily. The New Statesman brand can be attached to an event in a way that the Iain Dale, Tim Ireland/Bloggerheads or Guido Fawkes/order-order.com/Paul Staines brands cannot.

Indeed, it has been argued that these imagined communities are part of the drive behind the development of the European mode of nationalism.

Blogs are rather different. Linking to other websites on a blogroll is ubiquitous, picking up and commenting on other bloggers’ stories commonplace and trackback a further means of cross-pollination. While blogging might lead to an imagined community (there has already been talk of a republic of bloggers or even a nation of bloggers), individual bloggers will not and, I think, cannot.

Another round of blogging about blogging. Sigh.

xD.

Posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Categories: Blogging, Journalism, Media.
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