Fear the reaper, successful bloggers

Anxious about the success of your blog? With my one regular reader (me), perhaps I ought to be. But it seems one secret of blog success is to wait around for a bit and soon your day will come. Tristan Louis has analysed the top 100 blogs listed at Technorati against the same list nine months earlier. The results are very clear: blog readers are extremely fickle. Over the course of the period, 90 of the 100 top blogs lost position in the rankings, with 65 falling off the list alto­gether, making space for 65 new blogs to take their turn in the lime­light. Your (our) unsuc­cessful blogs are simply ahead of their time, just like we always said.

This goes against what is often said about suc­cessful blogs. The normal opinion you’ll read is that suc­cessful blogs are self-​​perpetuating. The more you are read, the more you are linked to. The more you are linked-​​to, the higher your search-​​engine rating and the more readers you’ll gain. This made a lot of sense to me as an explan­a­tion, and it’s the explan­a­tion I posted below in the ‘Get Rich Quick’ article. But it seems it’s not quite right. There’s also the counter-​​current of readers who are always looking for some­thing new. Judging by the results, the majority of readers will fall into that category over a nine-​​month period.

Technorati 100 Here Today Gone Tomorrow

If you take those numbers, it means that a total of 90 blogs (25 dropping within the list and another 65 dropping off the list com­pletely) ended up with a lower position in 9 months. Combined with the fact that 9 blogs moved up, this means that 99 percent of the list was dynamic.

This, to me, was a pretty stunning rev­el­a­tion: while there is much obses­sion about who is and isn’t on those lists, it seems that their nature is a lot more dynamic than expected. Going beyond that, it also look like being on top is no guar­antee that you will stay there (if anything, it is a guar­antee that you will not, as 9 out of 10 blogs fell and 65 percent dis­ap­peared from the list altogether).

Because the over­whelming majority of the blogs listed in May 2005 exper­i­enced a downward spin, it seems that the concept of a network effect is widely over­stated. In fact, there seems to be the equi­valent of a reverse pull, where being a Technorati 100 is only a short lived glory.

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