The
Idea: Taking a
closer look at the aggregate reader attention of the l-o-o-o-n-g tail
of the blogosphere suggests the Power Law is missing something big.
A
number of readers asked me how
I computed the data in my recent Bloggers,
Your Audience Awaits
post. People were especially surprised at my computation that only
2,000 blogs have an average of over 1,000 page-views per day. Here is
the data I published in that analysis:
|
"Inbound
Blogs"
per Blog
|
Combined
Average
Page Views
per Day
|
Average
Page Views
per Day
per Blog
|
Page Views
per Day
per Blog
|
Reader
Attention/Day
per Blog
|
100
A-list bloggers
|
>2,000
|
15
million
|
150,000
|
>15,000
|
100-400
hrs*
|
2,000
B-list bloggers
|
300-2,000
|
5
million
|
2,500
|
1,000-15,000
|
30-100
hrs
|
18,000
C-list bloggers
|
50-300
|
9
million
|
500
|
150-1,000
|
5-30
hrs
|
80,000
up-and-coming bloggers
|
10-50
|
8
million
|
100
|
50-150
|
1-5
hrs
|
5
million remaining active bloggers
|
<10
|
15
million
|
3
|
0-50
|
<1
hr
|
To produce this data, I started with Technorati's Top
100 (A-list)
blogs, each of which had over 2000 "inbound blogs" (i.e. 2000 other
blogs that had current links to them on their home pages). I then
correlated that to the daily number of page views by examining a sample
of these blogs' SiteMeter.com page-view
counts. There's a lot of
variation, but for the A-listers, the
average number of daily page views was 150,000 and, among those at the
bottom of this range, the median ratio of daily page views to inbound
blogs was 7.5, so I defined "A-listers" as those with over 2000 x 7.5 =
15,000 daily page views. I then took a cross-section of smaller blogs
and found the ratio of daily page views to inbound blogs declined from
about 6.0 for blogs in the second 100 to about 3.5 for blogs with
only 300-400 inbound blogs. By extrapolating Shirky's Power Curve for
inbound blogs I computed that the 2,100th ranking blog would have about
300 inbound blogs, and hence 300 x 3.5 = about 1,000 page-views per
day.
After extrapolating the data for the rest of the categories, I looked
at the average time spent per page view, again using the SiteMeter
data. I confirmed the statistic I had read elsewhere, that the average
reader hangs around for under 90 seconds per page view. But a quick
look
at some A-list bloggers showed their average readers hang around for
only 40 seconds per page view. So last night I dug into the SiteMeter
data in a little more detail. I discovered that the attention deficit I
had noted for A-listers is even worse than I thought: There is an inverse
relationship among
A-listers between number of page views and average time spent per page
view. Example: readers of Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Gawker and
Atrios averaged only 3-6
seconds
per page view. Multiply the average stay per page read times the number
of page reads per day and you get a maximum
of 400 hours per day (Daily Kos). That's a long way short of the 1700
hours I'd computed using the 40 second average, and a long way short of
the 8300 hours of reader attention the average US daily paper commands.
What this suggests is that online advertisers looking for a bargain
might be better off investing in a bundle of B-list bloggers, those
2,000 bloggers
who each get 1/4 the reader attention of the average A-lister, an
average of 60 hours/day of attentive eyeballs.
It also suggests that Shirky's Power Law tends to exaggerate the
importance and influence of the A-listers, whose aggregate reader
attention is only 25,000 hours per day compared to the 120,000 hours
per day of B-listers and 230,000 hours per day of C-listers. In fact,
the attention curve above isn't
a
Power curve at all -- just a
simple logarithmic curve with --
you guessed it -- a long and unexpectedly powerful tail. If I'd plotted
the whole 5 million active blogs on the chart above it would be 620
feet (200 metres) wide.
* revised, per
calculations described above
|
MADE IN CANADA
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instincts 
