Care and Feeding of Bloggers

How do we define success again? If we define success by amount of traffic then wouldn't craigslist be a bigger success than monster.com? The biggest number I've seen on craigslist's annual revenue is LESS THAN a little temp agency in New York City makes.

High traffic is expensive when none of those people are buying anything. While having people checking your blog three or four times a day (because of your short and sweet blog entires) will result in high traffic numbers, if those people aren't buying anything, they are COSTING you money.

I think one of the best ways to judge a website's success is by Adsense revenu and Adsense click-through-rate. Of the list of blogs cited in this analysis, (as far as I know) only Weblogs Inc was cited by Google itself as a star Adsense performer. Now get this, http://www.tempcity.com has a higher click-through-rate than Weblogs Inc. And, doesn't Weblogs Inc have a higher click-through-rate than Gawker Media?

There clearly are a lot of ways to "be a success" on the net, Gawker Media proves that you can "be a success" as long as you can keep getting the New York Times to write articles about you.

The problem that this piece highlights is the limitations of profit driven from ad revenue.

A well run subscription site can make a million dollars a month from less than 50K visitors a day. $75K a year is a drop in the ocean.

Blogs will evolve past being 'Operas' whose job it is to sell 'Soap'. The dawn of the content blog (which people pay to access in return for an ad free experience) is just waiting for the tools to be in place.

Craigslist.com is "designed" around the "fact" that it has a lot of traffic and that that traffic is not really producing any income for the website (at least not directly). Craigslist's income is from people posting job and real estate listings; people who don't necessarily "traffic" craigslist a great deal.

I submit to you that if craigslist.com's website design included a lot of graphics and buttons, etc (like any other "normal" website) craigslist would be out of business within days; because the bandwidth costs would make the "craigslist business model" unprofitable. This "fact of life" has been demonstrated lots of times by the "adult sites" that get a tremendous amount of traffic from people who don't generate any income for the sites.

Now, consider this "fact of life" in re the design of Gawker.com and other extremely high traffic blogs that don't seem to be selling anything and that "DO" have a lot of graphics and buttons and ads etc (that "DO" burn up a lot of bandwidth).

Bottom line, I don't see how very many of the so-called A-list bloggers can be making a lot of PROFIT, unless there are a whole lot of stupid advertisers throwing money at them and not expecting any real "customer transactions" from them in return.

"Mass Appeal" is for "Mass Media", bloggers shouldn't be trying to compete for "mass appeal" against Business Week and The New York Times.

While this quantitative analysis will be interesting, it is not going to unlock "what makes a blog successful."

The secret is not in how many of this and how much of that.

Any newbie blogger knows that.

Frequency of posts, character count of posts, etc. are not anywhere near the answer.

I emailed a survey to top bloggers and got some fascinating replies to what makes a blog successful.

LOL--Buy my book when I get around to publishing it.

There are so many ways to define "success" and differences of goals, plus high traffic is not success, nor is lots of comments, nor accolades in the blogosphere, nor is traditional MSM coverage.

LOL and ROTF

stephen, you're tantalizing us! One question: If success is not determined by traffic nor coverage by MSM nor comments and accolades in the blogosphere, how did you know who were the top bloggers to question?
One more thing: In this world of instant analysis and open information, saving up your insights for a book seems kinda old-fashioned.

I think maybe he's being sarcastic about the traffic and the MSM coverage, No? "Steven's" implication is that America is still an "All White/Christian/2.3 Kids" Monolith, that everyone in America is reading The New York Times (and the other "MSMs") to find out what is hip.

Maybe this "high-traffic"/"no sales"/"much hype" business model can sustain itself.