Cogblog

Interesting article at MindValley Labs on Positioning, “Social Polarity” and Vibrant Blog Communities, however it only went halfway. They tell you that to build a great community, you need to take a strong position against something, then market the blog to appropriate communities taking into account the positioning.

Theoretically great, but that is quite a mouthful. No hints on how to market the blog to these communities or draw in commenters.

Me, I have always taken a direct response-ish position relative to all of this: Comments are a function of blog traffic. You probably (don’t know, never been able to test) get more comments if you get more traffic. Perez Hilton gets more than Fred Wilson who gets more than me. Does Fred Wilson have a polarizing opinion? Not really.

In an effort to give more than opinion, we crunched a little, tiny, minute iota of data. I wanted to compare Scoble and Fred Wilson, unfortunately, avc.blogs.com doesn’t show up in comScore, Quantcast, or Google AdPlanner data, so I had to eyeball with Alexa.

So Scoble and Fred Wilson get basically the same amount of traffic according to Alexa:

Here is a bunch of other data I rapidly generated.

	avc.blogs.com	scobleizer.com	techcrunch.com	perezhilton.com
Uniques (Google AdPlanner)		61000	1600000	2400000
Page Views (AdPlanner)		162000	3500000	51000000
Total posts	11	14	32	51
Avg posts per day	1.375	1.75	16	51
Total Comments	410	298	1345	5211
Avg comments per post	37.3	21.3	42.0	102.2
Comments per unique		0.0049	0.0008	0.0022
Comments per page view		0.0018	0.0004	0.0001
Period	July 4 - July 11	July 4 - July 11	July 10-11	11-Jul
Comments per post	27	4	2	22
	23	10	8	163
	25	8	51	39
	11	11	20	72
	51	0	10	125
	66	18	62	24
	83	58	39	34
	37	2	100	110
	11	8	52	141
	61	21	52	88
	15	57	28	37
		35	22	83
		31	17	103
		35	23	98
			25	415
			34	274
			33	52
			15	73
			33	26
			39	192
			54	34
			88	89
			8	256
			90	81
			23	21
			18	42
			220	123
			15	52
			36	145
			18	121
			105	56
			5	116
				108
				51
				173
				158
				86
				54
				44
				145
				47
				62
				293
				87
				45
				46
				78
				174
				97
				103
				53

Not the world’s greatest data set, but at least enough for us to have something to talk about. So Perez Hilton posts a ton every day, gets a ton of visitors and gets a boatload of comments. TechCrunch posts less, gets slightly less traffic than Perez and gets significantly fewer comments per post, Scoble and Fred Wilson post a lot less, get a lot less traffic, and Scoble gets a lot fewer comments per post. But Fred WIlson gets nearly as many comments as TechCrunch!

You might also note that the smaller sites tend to get more comments per post. Maybe this indicates a more vocal, hard core audience, though my hypothesis would have been that audiences follow some bell curve-ish distribution of active vs not active readers.

A more interesting way to further this analysis would have been to break down the comments and determine how many large an audience is actually generating them, modeling the vocalness of the minority at different points.

Regardless, we can probably safely say that, given Fred and Scoble’s traffic similarities, it is not strictly traffic correlated. Furthermore, one could conclude that opinion (polarization) matters less than one might think because Scoble tends to be thought of as more polarizing than Fred Wilson.

As I say all the time, turns out there is not an obvious way to build a blog community.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.