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The free market of blogs

The post below is not about Jessica Cutler (even though I can’t help mentioning the topic), so if you’re just here to read the latest Jessica Cutler news and gossip, you can skip the rest.

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The subject of blogs has been in the media a lot this week, thanks in part to the Jessica Cutler sex scandal. There was also an article about blogs in The New York Times.

The New York Times article points out that most blogs are read by few:

But four percent of a huge number of online users is still a pretty big number. Instapundit, for example, gets over a hundred thousand visits a day. What determines why one blog gets read a lot and another not at all? Why, the free market, of course!

But wait, does the free market apply to blogs if people maintain them for free as a hobby? Yes it does. In the free market of products and services for profit, businesses compete for profit. In the free market of blogs, bloggers compete for readership. There is more joy in writing a blog read by a thousand people a day than there is in writing a blog read only by its author. The New York Times article suggests that people whose blogs become popular are more likely to stick with them and spend more time blogging.

There are two components to getting people to read your blog: (1) maintaining a blog that people want to read; and (2) marketing the blog so people can find out about it.

Marketing, of course, is a very important component. A mediocre blog with good marketing will be read a lot more than a great blog with bad marketing. There is also the factor of marketing inertia; once you become big, you can stay big with less marketing effort. Other people will even do your marketing for you. Three paragraphs ago I did some free marketing for Instapundit—oops, I just did it again. I have written before about the importance of marketing and how we’re moving from an information economy to a marketing economy.

While it’s possible for great marketing to make people want to read a blog that they’d otherwise have no interest in reading—the blogosphere equivalent of the Pet Rock—in most cases you also have to write what people want to read. This alone prevents the vast majority of blogs from ever gaining much of a following.

Of course it helps to be a good writer. Some people are; some people aren’t. There’s not much else to say about this.

Of more interest is the subject matter of the blog. If you have a factory, and you want to produce goods that will be profitable, you have to produce goods that people are interested in buying. The same applies to blogs. You have to write about subjects people are interested in reading about.

Most bloggers want to write about their personal lives. Hardly anyone wants to read about other people’s personal lives. Yet that’s what 90% of blogs are bout. Merely having a blog about something other than your personal life puts you ahead of 90% of the competition.

The rules of blog subject matter follow the basic pattern of supply and demand seen in the non-virtual world of goods and services. If a million people want to read about a topic, but there are a hundred thousand blogs writing about it, how many hits a day do you expect? On average, maybe thirty. But if there’s a topic that 50,000 people want to read about in a given day, and there are only four blogs covering that topic, you might get 30,000 hits.

During the last several days, I discovered a topic that a lot of people want to read about. That’s right, our friend Jessica Cutler. In the non-virtual market of goods and services, an entrepreneur will see an unmet demand and try to fulfill it. The same thing happens in the blogosphere. In this case, I discovered an unmet demand for coverage of the Jessica Cutler sex scandal, and I fulfilled that need, resulting in huge traffic to my blog that I never before dreamed possible.

That’s right, people would rather read about sex scandals than read about economics. That’s why a great blog like Truck and Barter hardly gets any visits, while Wonkette, who Richard Leiby of the Washington Post just today called a “foul mouthed vixen”, gets about five hundred times as much traffic. She even gets free marketing from Richard Leiby.

Unfortunately, the Jessica Cutler effect is only temporary. The scandal is already dying, and soon the traffic will disappear. But the lesson is clear. Marketing, plus writing about what people want to read about, especially if few others are writing about it, is what leads to high readership.

posted Friday, May 28, 2004