Aquatic Inference Engine

A blog advocate responds to skeptics who point to the high “churn rate” (in this situation the rate at which blogs are initiated and abandoned shortly thereafter, believed to be as high as 66%).

Advocate’s response is that high turnover is a smokescreen because those who try blogging and then leave aren’t a sign of weakness, these people are not going to blog right now because they just aren’t “into blogging” on a fundamental level (case in point, people like me who try sports gyms but never end up joining) or the utility offered has not yet become compelling enough to keep them around.

Critics who say that blogging is doomed because there aren’t enough eyes to read all of this content are misguided, cost to blog is now at zero (excluding internet access costs) and so it does not matter how few readers a blog has (again, case in point), our motivations to blog and keep blogging are as diverse as we (global “we”) are.

For this little magazine, I think this means that the metric of “how many people have read my blog today?” is not a be-all-end-all indicator that nothing can ever be sold into the “blogging market” (not that I ever believed that anyway). Perhaps it will be more dynamic, I’ve been thinking about comic books a lot lately as the right model for this in a lot of ways. Design, layout, even content. But marketing and distribution for sure. When I was a collector your subscriptions if you had them, were through the store (not available directly from the publisher like magazine subs). Comic book publishing must, similar to blogging, have a pretty high churn, and so they only sell retail…that seems like a logical distribution method for us, and moreover, the cost of taking subscribers online-only (no phonebanks or human-human interfaces) would seem low enough that we can offer both, with the focus and funds going mostly to retail distribution.

Also, a New York Times article on the above-linked survey quotes the company’s C.O.O. on an unpublished stat. the growth in active bloggers over the past two years:

“Last year [ed. 2002] there were 1.62 million active blogs, according to Perseus’ research.
This year [2003] that number is expected to rise to 3.3 million. In 2004, Henning
predicts, the figure will rise to 5.86 million. That’s a number worth talking
about.”

So current annual growth in active useres of ~100%, which more or less agrees with the Jan, 2004 NYTimes article I’ve been citing…good stuff.

Feel free to agree/disagree/comment (and no neither I, my car, or my bedroom smells faintly of beets - I use these categories for a reason you know.)