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Almost no one reads blogs???
Frank Barnako, who I read daily and usually agree with, said something on Friday that really irritates me.
He said, "almost nobody reads blogs".
Well I must beg to differ.
Frank - somewhere around 5,000 to 10,000 people per month read my blog. And its just my personal experiment with transparency.
Wonkette got 140,000 visits last wednesday. That's one woman doing that. I seriously doubt the Washington Post, the paper Frank compared blogs to, gets 140,000 visits per day for every journalist it has on staff.
And how about that for transparency? Nick Denton posts the sitemeter stats for his blogs for the world to see. I am not aware of any "traditional media" company that does that.
Instapundit did over 8 million (yes MILLON) pages views last month.
If these stats read "nobody to you" Frank then I am missing something.
Frank - please tell us how many people subscribe to your daily column. I'll wager its less than many blogs daily visitor stats.
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Sometimes I love to give out, and just rub it in the face of the ignorant. But this time I wont because other people have done it so eloquently for me. First to be rebuked is the statement by Frank Barnako of CBS.MarketWatch.com that:
Excuse me ... [Read More]
Tracked on Jan 18, 2006 4:17:09 AM
Posted October 17, 2004 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Yes, that article got me pretty incensed, too. And what's the deal with ad clutter on the Marketwatch newsletters? That's just plain annoying.
Posted by: Max | Oct 18, 2004 10:57:45 AM
While the blogs you listed do get a lot of hits indeed, as a more general comment, one would have to agree w/Frank. For example, how many hits does your daughter's blgo get on a daily basis Fred?
When you look out across the blogosphere, it's not just about people like Instapundit, Josh Mitchell, and John Battelle. When blog services like MySpace has 2 million bloggers, do you honestly believe they're getting the readership numbers to be significant?
Fred, you're a VC, why do you think that so many people are interested in what you think about MP3s, or anything that isn't fundraising oriented? Yes, people are checking out blogs, many have only just heard of them, but to say that people are reading these in droves, at least here in the U.S. alone, I doubt it too.
Just asked two friends fm LA that are here in town about blogs and whether they have looked at them. Both are heavy users of e-mail and the Web, neither of them has bothered. They've heard of MySpace and have joined social networks like Friendster and Orkut, but neither has spent any time on blogs. Actually, one of them did check one out and said it just seemed like babble w/lil' substance. This was a MySpace blog, but what's important to realize, is that that's where the large numbers of bloggers are today. Six Apart has a great reputation among the uppercrust of the blogging world because one has to pay to use it, but it also has less than 1 million people using it.
Just some additional scattered thoughts for your consideration :-)
Posted by: Pierre | Oct 18, 2004 1:20:54 PM
@Pierre:
Just the numbers: our internal estimates are a few hundred page impression per blogger per month. Now, if you look at the two million myspace bloggers, that's a lot of time people are spending on the medium of blogs. Read that Wired article about the 80:20 rule not applying to the internet - it's the tail that's revolutionizing the whole dog :)
The "irrelevancy of content" you cite as the prime reason why blogs can be ignored is a fallacy: content is always relevant to someone, at the least family, friends or a like-minded stranger. In the Google era, it's just a question of matching content to audience. I believe everyone can have 10 to 15 loyal readers. The old problems of the homepage don't exist anymore - weblogs solve them.
The comemrcial future of weblogs lies in the fact that they are the easiest publication tool for the individual user, the first personal one-to-many communication device. As the amount of media we own in digital form grows - text, images, audio/video - we will need place to store, organize and share these things. That is what blogs will provide in the coming years. They will be replacing the personal homepage AND creating a whole new market in public/private digital media storing & sharing.
It's easy to look at the journalist side of the equation and be excited about the impact blogs are having. It's also easy to attack blogs from this angle because they ARE very small compared to mass media (but the real wonder is how much influence amateur journalists have just because they have been given publishing power). I believe the real implication of blogs is on the mass market communication side of things. This is what is commercially exciting about weblogs.
Posted by: Max | Oct 18, 2004 2:05:21 PM
Well stated Max.
My reaction was a result that I see so often the blogger conversation get confused. The issues for the high profile bloggers (primarily those of journalists or wannabe journalists) is a bit different than the individuals on MySpace. Their reasons for blogging are frequently very different, and the issues and the importance of Instapundit are very different than those behind a 16 year old girl writing about her anorexia issues on Xanga. Having said that, you are absolutely correct to say that 10-15 people reading a blog is still important.
Blogging is changing the face of media and the content that's being made available to us, but I see it as taking its place in the current media landscape, not replacing any of the actors in it.
I'm still surprised by how many people I've talked to who should know more about blogs and don't, but like other things, I'm sure this will resolve itself over time.
Thanks again for your reply Max.
Posted by: Pierre | Oct 18, 2004 5:59:42 PM
Who cares? I have made at least one new friend through my blogging, to me that makes it a success. If I had ten thousand readers I'd be ecstatic, but it wouldn't change my reasons for blogging.
Posted by: jackson | Oct 19, 2004 10:19:40 AM
Obviously my son’s Pokemon blog isn't going to pull down these kind of numbers. That's not a valid comparison. I just spent twenty minutes reading this blog because I want to know what a VC thinks about a wide variety of topics. I write about high tech marketing in my blog, but it is a wide variety of minds that interests me the most. If you are an entrepreneur, you certainly want to know what VC's are thinking about! It’s simple business logic really.
Posted by: Rob Thrasher | Oct 22, 2004 10:06:22 AM
funny about blogs från Sweden, see article at http://what.se
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