Hey, you there in the corner! You should be our next featured blogger…right?
Wordpress.com had, in my opinion, one of the most clever(and also most painful) April fools pranks when they made everybody blog of the minute. Unfortunately, since then they’ve gone back to the same old “algorithm”, which simply ranks the 100 blogs getting the most traffic for that day and picks one out from the top. Of course, there are some excellent blogs that also get decent traffic and thus become “blog of the minute”, like the current champion, Strange Maps. I would have never discovered that excellent and unique blog had it not been for Wordpress.com’s featured blogs. But I am also certain that there are dozens more blogs just as good that I have never discovered because they are not blessed with the traffic they rightly deserve. Traffic rarely, if ever, equals quality. For every popular genius out there blogging, there must be 100 even more brilliant bloggers out there toiling away in anonymity (I am not one of them). Somehow, the Wordpress ecosystem, and the blogosphere as a whole has become incredibly skewed. In blogging, there is a very small middle class in terms of traffic, which I am fortunate to be a part of. Most are either very visible or, much more likely, very invisible, and some of those certainly don’t deserve that invisibility. I’ve got the math to prove it.
Every time Neomeme is among the top 100 blogs on Wordpress.com, I am a little happy but also a little sad. If with only a few hundred unique visitors on any given day my blog is among the 100 most visited blogs out of over 835,000, then how little traffic must most poor Wordpress bloggers get? And does the amount of traffic they get really correlate with their quality?
Let us take a mathematical approach to all this, and, along the way, make lots of baseless and unprovable assumptions, in the manner of true scientists. Take 835,191 , the number of blogs on Wordpress.com as of this writing. First, we should only focus on blogs that are currently active. According to Technorati’s very reputable State of the Blogosphere report, about 55% of all blogs are active. We can assume this number holds across Wordpress.com.
835,191x0.55=459,355
Then, remove the spam blogs, which, according to Wired constitute 56% of all blogs.
459,355x0.44=211,303
This leaves us 211,303 active, non-spam blogs on Wordpress.com. Now, let’s then make the big, but reasonable assumption that the “quality” of blogs, however, you define it, roughly follows the standard normal distribution. That is, a minority of active, non-spam blogs are very bad, another minority is very good, and most are somewhere in the middle. Data sets as disparate as IQ and chance events are normally distributed, so I think it’s safe to say that blog quality is as well. Here is the normal curve, with associated percentiles:
This curve shows, for example that 0.5% of points in a normal distribution are in the 99th percentile(higher than 99% of all points, the top 1%). Let’s apply this to Wordpress.com blogs. Of our 211,303 active blogs, a sizeable 211,303x0.005=1,056 are in the top 1 percent in terms of quality. Over 1,000 extremely excellent bloggers, better than me and most likely better than you are currently writing on Wordpress.com. How many of them do you read regularly?
The purpose of this post is not to bemoan the inequality or unfairness of the current Wordpress top blogs system, which showcases blogs with a lot of traffic, thus giving them more traffic in an endless circle-jerk of power or to, say, encourage the Wordpress.com crowd to pick a random quality but unknown blog and collectively visit it on a single day, thus bringing it to the public eye. Rather, I just want to encourage you to branch out from your common circle of familiar blogs, do a search or surf to a random tag, and find a diamond in the rough you were never aware of.
For now…. I guess it’s back to seeing Scobleizer at the top again, day after day.
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Great post. There should be more statistics in blogs.
I think it’s tough getting through the mire of dubious quality, but do you not think that quality bloggers with time and persistence will find ways to shine?
Also - how do you think the “probloggers” moving their (usually quality) blogs to their own servers effects the distribution?
Another good post. I think the spam number is lower on Wordpress.com because they crack down much harder than on Blogger, but it’s hard to know.
I’m glad you liked the April Fool’s idea. I came up with that months ago.
@majic: That is very true, you do see the “upper-middle” of bloggers eventually move from wordpress.com from self-hosted to get more access to themes, plugins and revenue off of their blogs.
@majic: and in my case, a not so visible blogger suddenly stricken with free hosting via engtech’s blog, moving to my own site as well (where it is surprising difficult to track stats as well as on wp.com, btw).
While I also think the 56% figure is too high, you also have to take into account all those empty blogs here that were created by those needing Akismet keys. There’s tons of them.
Thanks you for this post. Although I’m a right brain artsy type that’s allergic to math, your explanation was clear enough for me to understand. I appreciate it and also the sentiment you shared.
I don’t have the time or inclination to keep pressing “next blog” and hopefully uncover a hidden gem. I have neglected feedreaders, email piled up, comments to answer and I frequently find myself too stressed to take the time to think and submit truly meaningful comments.
What I suggested months age was that I’d like to see the blog of the minute become random choice. No fancy algorithm required just cull the mature blogs out of the mix and let ‘em roll.
Cheers
@majic yeah, bloggers with time, persistence, and a penchant for linkbaiting will shine
It’s certainly possible to get your voice heard and increase your exposure through any of a million techniques- but for every blogger finding that big audience, ten equally good bloggers probably will not.
I tried to stick to Wordpress.com because that’s where the unknown bloggers are. Bloggers with their own hosting will probably have the audience to justify the expense.
@drmike I can take into account whatever I want and massage my data accordingly like any good statistician. Let’s arbitrarily say only 10% of Wordpress blogs are active- I’ll counter by using the 90th percentile instead of the 99th percentile for my example.
@timethief Random chance might have those empty blogs drmike mentioned pop up a bit too often. Perhaps blogs selected by an editor would be the best approach.
[…] Wordpress blogging(neomeme) Wordpress.com had, in my opinion, one of the most clever(and also most painful) April fools pranks when they made everybody blog of the minute. Unfortunately, since then they’ve gone back to the same old “algorithm”, which simply ranks the 100 blogs getting the most traffic for that day and picks one out from the top. Of course, there are some excellent blogs that also get decent traffic and thus become “blog of the minute”, like the current champion, Strange Maps. I would have never discovered that excellent and unique blog had it not been for Wordpress.com’s featured blogs. […]
Actually staff has stated that they have a ranking method of what gets dropped in there. It’s not the blog with the most traffic. And they have stated that they have a method to manually select a blog if they think it should be in there.
Link?
Anyway, the question remains as to whether that method is used often enough to make a difference for blogs that would not be up there otherwise.
Tell me more
They should start focusing on the blogs of the more ordinary people instead of those who already gained fame here just to balance it out.
[…] 1) People bitching over the most smallest of things! 2) Being indecisive 3) So-called popularity contests 4) Missing a friend and hating it 5) Boring holidays 6) Starting things over 7) Being at peace even […]
Ed: Exactly. Scobleizer doesn’t need any more exposure. Many others do.
I’m a firm believer that blogging is one of the few online meritocracy’s. If you are consistently producing quality content, actively participating in the community, and taking a few basic step to promote yourself you will gather a readership. The tough part is being realistic in assessing how distinct and entertaining your product is, and realizing that building an audience is an incremental process that takes patience.
Ultimately you are selling your personality and insight, if either or is lacking you will likely toil in obscurity…unless you choice to pander to search engines and people looking for sites containing nothing but quotes and youtube videos.
But I wonder how Wordpress will implement this idea to let others receive equal exposure? I’d say they could make a system that’ll put the “popular” blog(s) on hold for a certain amount of time (eg: a month or a bit less) to let the others flourish, so to say.
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