Thursday Feb 23 2006 - 8:02am
Blog Readers Are (Blank)
by Sean
under alwaysbeta, blogs
with 9 comments
Now that I’m writing for a blog that actually gets some readership (I guess my life and dense technical issues don’t have mass appeal after all), I’ve noticed some things about the behavior of blog readers. Thanks in large part to the incredible stat-crunching power of Google Analytics, I can slice and dice information about our site’s visitors in countless ways. Over the almost-one-month that we’ve been on air, a few trends have already started to emerge.
As they say in show business, you should always know your audience. Thus, in order to help you improve your own blog with sage observations and witticisms, I have attempted to capture a few of the traits which I see present in the countless RSS Pacmen and Pacwomen who consume our content.
Blog Readers Are Procrastinators
First things first. Let’s take a survey shall we? How many of you are sitting at work right now reading this? That counts working from home. Yes, it looks like a large majority of the hands are up.
It turns out that general blog traffic keels over and dies every weekend. To what can we attribute this interesting statistical trend? (The fact that the trend is magnified in business blogs might provide a little clue…) Yes, it turns out that most people like to take a break from work and relieve their minds from the monotonous drudgery of the daily grind. What better way to do it than with a steaming cup of coffee and their trusty feed reader of choice? Then when the weekend rolls around, everyone finds something better to do, and the visit count takes a nose dive. Come Monday, the hordes are back at their desks and back on the blogs.
I’m not trying to point any fingers or make any value judgments here. Just pointing out a trend. I guess the next wordpress plugin I build should be a “Panic, My Boss is Coming” button which pops up some generic looking spreadsheets via Lightbox. It’s Procrastination2.0!
Blog Readers Are Hard Sells
It’s easy to suck people in, but hard to make them stick around. Circus sideshows have known it for years, and bloggers had best learn the same. If you are a blogger, you can expect to grow in fits and starts.
Check out the traffic visualization above (recorded over the month so far). Each spike represents some new incoming link to our site. Many people click. Many people visit. Average pageviews go way down. What happens next? Traffic decays back towards a slightly higher average than before the spike, and then the process repeats itself.
Yes, most blog readers can be pulled in by pretty lights and sounds (or CSS layouts), but in the end, many of them won’t choose to stick around and become a regular. It’s not that your content sucks, it’s just that they don’t fit your niche. Getting dugg or slashdotted will be good for your traffic, but not as good as you might think. Unless you’ve installed some sort of hypnotizing flash animation in your header, you can probably count on a surge and decay pattern which will gradually build your base of regulars. Just keep the content coming and take advantage of the linklove whenever you can.
Blog Readers Are In a Hurry
You know the deal. Your boss is walking down the cubicle isle, but you’ve just happened upon a blog post and you want to leave a comment. You’ve read the entire title of the post, which mentioned Google somewhere, and you glanced at an image long enough to determine that it was some sort of diagram. You’re obviously ready to make an authoritative comment criticizing the post’s position! You hammer out something having to do with China, Yahoo, and dark fiber, something that will sound “buzzy”, and submit.
Luckily it’s not a large percentage of readers, but some people just don’t read very closely before they comment. And sometimes they don’t read at all. These commenters may suggest or complain about issues already covered in the post. They comment and leave, never to return again. That’s not participating in the conversation. That’s called leaving a turd in the moderation queue, and it’s only a step above comment spam. Happily, most readers actually read before commenting! Still, beware the dark side.
And We Love Them Anyway…
Despite all of their quirks and crazy demands for more splash pages and animated gifs, we love our readers. Yes, even the guy in the back who wrote his own RSS reader in Lisp. Without you guys, there’d be no point to doing any of this. We love conversing with you. We love to read comments and discuss issues. We love to suggest interesting sites and get more in return.
So readers, keep on reading. And bloggers, let’s make sure we appreciate our audience.
1
Procrastination 2.0 - lol. Yep, It’s true here I am procrastinating. I really should be working on my clients website but am I nope.
We’ll keep on reading so long as you keep on putting up content. I’m a new regular having been drawn in by your lightbox trickery.
Alex
2
I’m pretty sure you can call me a regular. You’re dead on about reading at work! Actually, I just keep a tab for alwaysBETA open in FF and refresh it about once an hour - just in case. Most other blogs that I read don’t post more than once per day, which is understandable, because most of them are single-user blogs. I’ve never read a group blog before, and I think it’s a great idea - it keeps the content flowing. I really enjoy the articles, and I still can’t get over the design/features - it’s brilliant.
3
At first I was going to say something about dark fiber … but you totally called me on that one. Anyways, your blog reader analysis was very clever. This post is a perfect example of why I do read this blog– the lot of you put serious thought into whatever it is you’re talking about. I can read other blogs where the writers will post lifeless news bits, or pure wit-filled junk, but that does not get my wheels turning. It’s true there are many horrible blogs out there, but there are some real gems too. You can’t have blog yang without blog yin. If that makes any sense. My mind goes off on these tangents.
Okay, okay. Hmm.. I’d better stick with music. Thanks for getting my noodle going, and for the appreciation. I, the reader, appreciate you [and the crew] aswell.
Party on, dudes.
4
Useful analysis. I already feel somewhat inclined to becoming a regular, and excellent page and usability design certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
A minor template tip: even on a broad-band connection, background graphics may take some moment to load, and the nice blackish little rounded corners take shorter to load than the field background. If you specify a dark background-color too, besides the background-image, it won’t look as embarrassing during that first few moments of loading.
5
For what it’s worth, you’ve nailed a trend that is much broader than just blog readers. As the interactive media folks at Mullen (ad agency) pointed out to me on several occassions, just about any site we advertisied for had significantly lower traffic during the week. I’m actually suprised your expereince is so readily identifiable, I would have thought a more tech savvy audience would be online more regularly than the mass market. I would have guessed that lower income groups might only be able to be online during the working hours and the most likely to fall off the web during the weekends.
When did you guys get your Google analytics account? I’ve been on the waiting list for what seems like forever!
6
4th line, I meant “lower traffic during the weekEND.”
whoops!
7
(aβ Member)
Rio,
I signed up for my Google Analytics account when they first opened them up for public signups and I’ve had it ever since. I signed up for BrianShih.com, but since they recently upped the number of sites you can monitor with one account, it was trivial to add alwaysBETA to the tracking.
Hope you get one soon
-Brian
8
I’m one of those people who followed a link over to your site via Darren Rowse. This is a great article and explains a few of my worrying queries. I’ve only been going for the past month with this blog and it never made sense why my hits were good for one day and then dropped lower again. Make sense and has inspired me to do some things differently.
Cheers.
9
For me my feed-reader became a distraction that I could get lost in. I tried to read my slimmed down list every day once for maybe an hour but would end up jumping from one thing to another to another and before I’ve noticed hours have gone by and I haven’t even read 80% of the unread entries and I have no idea how I got to the page I’m on, hehe.
This is part of a large problem I fear is developing I like to call cyber-ADD… we spend so much time in front of the computer “multitasking” that we’re killing our attention span and memory. Our brains don’t natively multitask and studies show that people can only keep track of about 3 seperate entities at a time in their short term memory… so with all the different stuff we’re juggling on the computer, plus the phone, and other environment-related real life stuff we might be trying to do… well, we lose track of things pretty fast. My brother is a perfect example, having spent most of his life in front of the computer… these days his attention span is nil and he can loses just about everything he owns because he has become so absent minded that he leaves his stuff everwhere and doesn’t realize it. It’s not due to aging either… he just graduated college. Having grown up this way it’s hard to just pay attention to whatever it is you’re doing no matter how mundane but it helps quite a bit, so you don’t, for instance, abscent-mindedly put body wash in your hair instead of shampoo (not that I’ve done that recently, ahem). I’ve been meaning to write up an article about Task-Based Digital Information Management and the Zen of the Information Age but I’ve been meaning to write a lot of things and instead get caught up in work or slowly piecing together my own blog design.
For me personally, it’s not so much about procrastination but rather the fact that I’m addicted to knowledge. A lot of the time I have to step back and put things in perspective… is it really important for me to know the lowdown on all the up and coming technologies everyday, all the latest software releases, or all the newest bargains when I can’t even afford to pay off student loans and have things like shelves to put books on in my apartment? Not so much, no. As a result I’ve stopped checking my rss reader almost all-together and only read blogs when I’m looking for specific info.
I think the way we do things now with public blogs are not at all practical, not at all efficient, and more about getting money or notariety through today’s advertisement driven web media than efficiently sharing knowledge with others. Things will change eventually but not until the bubble bursts again or the big players these days have their hands forced somehow and have to ditch their current tactics and move on to a model that’s more accessible and more efficient for friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded people to share what they want to with who they want to from where they want to easily and securely. When that happens I doubt the blogosphere, RIAs, or even web-browsers will necessarily have much to do with how we interact over the net (if it doesn’t eat itself first).
Hrm, I had some praise along with a few minor suggestions for your site, but I’ve already gotten far enough off-topic so I’ll save it for another time. Good to see your project is doing well though!
Ja