Trends – Blogging’s value
The latest edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary contains at least one entry that won’t mean much to those who do not user the internet frequently. The word isn’t “wedgie,” even though it gained its official entry at the same time. Rather, the word alluded to is “blog” that might have some still unsure of what it means. While “blog’s” origins are credited to 1999, its ascendancy to cultural front-runner occurred last year, signified by its being the number one looked up word at Merriam-Webster online for 2004. Many readers of this newsletter probably have a dual perspective on blogging – on one front they find themselves oversaturated with news concerning blogs, yet on a different front they have not fully wrapped their heads around blogging’s value. This is to say that many net-savvy marketers can’t understand why blogs deserve the attention they appear to be receiving. That is why, this week’s Trends takes a closer look at blogging and some of the reasons behind its media attention.
The words that blog beat out are a good place to start in this exploration of blogging. Again, referencing the most looked up words in 2004 according to Merriam-Webster online, blog beat out the following: incumbent, electoral, and insurgent. Hardly any other topics were as significant or widespread last year, so that blogs topped them certainly speaks to the wide ranging impact blogging had, if not in absolute terms certainly in relative ones. So how big are blogs? According to Dave Sifry’s Technorati.com, they track more than 8 million blogs. When it comes to the most popular, truthlaidbear.com reports the top blog receives close to 400,000 visits per day.
Many sites receive 400,000 or more visits per day. Ebaumsworld.com for instance receives more than 1 million visits per day, yet aside from its fans, very little attention is paid to it. Therein lays the key difference and fascination with blogs as compared to the multitude of popular, high traffic content sites on the web. Similar to such sites, blogs are nothing more than content sites, but in contrast to other high trafficked sites, blogs are only content, and generally the content of its author. A true blog does not have a team of writers. It does not rely on in-house programming. Other netizens help contribute by posting comments, and blogs, while personal, aren’t limited to one’s own original topics.
Ebaumsworld.com, while great, requires significant technological effort. Many people receive funny jokes, pictures, and movie clips in their email, but very few people can create a sticky site based around them. That same barrier to entry does not exist with blogs. Anyone proficient enough in sending emails and using the most basic text editing program can create a blog. While amazingly simple, what blogs have done is democratize content creation and most importantly the ability for a person’s opinion to gain a following. But without the internet, blogs would be very good journal programs – helpful, nice, but nothing noteworthy.
Circling back to one of bloggings biggest indirect draws, the opportunity to be discovered, contrast that with the path journalists traditionally had to take. A person interested in writing would go to college, major in journalism, write for their school paper, intern at a literary company, graduate hoping to land a job where they interned, and if that lucky, they would begin the long climb to being a published writer. If this person had an interest in world politics for example, it often meant working for a small local paper with a tiny circulation hoping to graduate to a bigger market over time. Only a few would ever become the next Thomas Friedman. Blogs have changed that.
In the end, the big hype about blogging is the simplicity. Prior to sites such as Blogspot.com, to publish a website meant knowing html. It meant being able to piece together the often confusing processes of registering a name, getting it hosted, creating the html, publishing the site, and modifying it. Free sites like Tripod.com and domain registrars came close to fulfilling the need for an easy, quick, idiots guide to creating websites. But it was the blogging sites/software/online communities that closed the loop and offered it best. They tapped into an unknown market need, creating a force few probably would have predicted. So powerful is it that the top online brands have invested in blogging – Google purchased Blogger.com, Yahoo offers Yahoo 360, and Ask Jeeves snapped up Bloglines.com.
For our industry, blogs mean inventory. They share a close tie to the follow-up craze, social networking. Similar to social networking, blogs not only mean more inventory, they provide a means for the continued generation of inventory. No doubt about it, blogging is a big opportunity, but in many respects the proverbial blogging cart has been put before the horse. Traffic numbers for blogs are objectively not that big. But that blog writers have been issued White House press passes tells us that we should pay attention to them. More importantly, we should understand why they caught on and look to service that need.
