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Girl with a One-Track Mind - How Blogs Grow
August 21, 2006
Yesterday, I was interviewed on Sky News about blogging. Why do people blog, read blogs, etc. The interview raised an important issue - why do blogs gain readership. Much of this comes down to subject matter and quality of posts. A common perception is that the mainstream media creates the buzz around individual blogs and makes them popular. While this is true of some blogs - it is not always the case. As anyone who blogs knows, there is a viral aspect to blogs and a real community of bloggers.
Let's look at Hitwise data on three blogs and dissect this further.
Girl with a One-Track Mind
Girl With a One-Track Mind, author Zoe Margolis who has been writing her blog under the pseudonym Abby Lee was recently unmasked after several of her posts appeared in the Sunday Times. The media frenzy surrounding her revealed identity and the blog's erotic content led to an eight-fold increase in site visits in the past two weeks. The blog rocketed from a ranking of 133 in our Lifestyle - Blogs and Personal Websites category two weeks ago to 17th last week.
After analysing our data, I concluded that the increase in visits to Margolis' blog is down to the media attention which drove consumers to search for the blog and to visits from News and Media sites. Here's what I considered. Last week, News and Media sites accounted for 7% of upstream visits to Girl with a One-Track Mind. Blogs and Personal Websites accounted for 9%. Search Engines accounted for 29% of site visits last week, and the term "girl with a one track mind" accounted for 22% of visits to the blog from search terms and all of the top 10 terms sending visits to the site were either for the blog's title or variations of the author's pseudonym. A quick search on Google News found 487 news results for a search on "girl with a one track mind". This compares to 192 for "little green footballs" (more on that below).
Whilst blog sites did account for a good portion of site visits, it does seem that the media storm around Margolis' blog caused the increase in visits. Whilst she had a loyal following prior to the publicity, the mainstream media fuelled the recent growth.
Little Green Footballs
Let's turn now to Little Green Footballs, which came to fame after revealing that a Reuters photograph of Beirut had been doctored. The site jumped to a ranking of 26th the week ending 12th August 2006, up from 39th the week before, with an 88% increase in market share of UK visits week-on-week. The growth of LGF's site seems to be down to links from influential bloggers and political sites.
Whilst the blog received some media attention, the attention was focussed on the photo rather than the blog. Analysis of the upstream sites sending it visits reveals that search engines became a less important source of visits during the week ending 12th August while visits from blogs grew to account for 14% of site visits. Politics sites accounted for 8% of site visits and Net Communities and Chat sites accounted for 9%. Also worth noting, searches for "girl with a one track mind" outweighed searches for "little green footballs" by a factor of 4 last week. Share of searches is a good measure of awareness, and can be driven by attention in the mainstream media.
I also checked the number of links to the sites in Technorati. Whilst Girl With a One-Track Mind has 1,042 inbound links from 592 blogs, Little Green Footballs had 30,087 links from 4,924 blogs.
Together this points to influential blogs, online communities and political sites driving growth in visits to this site.
Arseblog
Girl with a One-Track Mind and Little Green Footballs have been in the news recently. To provide a different perspective, let's look to Arseblog, which has consistently ranked among the top 50 in the Hitwise Blogs and Personal Websites category in the past year and last week the site ranked 28th in the category. How do people find the site? Mainly through sport sites, in particular Football. Last week, 44% of the site's visits were from Sports sites, 10% from search engines and 8% from email services.
According to Technorati, the site has 254 links from 160 blogs and there were no stories found on Google News when I searched for "arseblog".
This site offers a terrific example of one that has grown organically. There are more than a few Arsenal fans out there... Which brings me back to my original point about subject matter being important.
Hat tip to Iain Dale for referring the kind people at Sky to me.
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Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:11 PM
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Comments
Technorati services are overdone, e.g. if the site is not listed, technorati will not provide any info about it.
Posted by milo317 | August 21, 2006 11:50 PM
Alongside Iain Dale, as a key political blogger, has been Guido Fawkes' blog of "parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy". it has consistently got up the nosees of mainstream journalists/broken stories of relative national importance [delete as appropriate!].
Declaration of interest here: the Travolution Blog has, in some part thanks to Heather Hitwise (as she is affectionately known in travel circles), risen to 82,000th in the blogosphere, according to Technorati (77 links from 32 blogs). A nice statistic, especially when taking into consideration that Technorati searches 51.8 million blogs! Hoorah!
Posted by Kevin May | August 21, 2006 11:58 PM
An analysis of blog popularity based solely on technical figures fails to explain why certain blogs attract such a fervent following.
Both girl with a one track mind and Little Green Footballs deal with a subject matter that is liminal in the mainstream media: GwaotM is about risque personal sexual revelations; LGF is about anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim racism.
These blogs appeal to a base interest in many people that does not pass muster in the professional media. Much of it is lies, conjecture, speculation and titilation; in short, it's the Daily Star without the Benny Hill humor.
Posted by lgfwatch | August 28, 2006 08:03 PM
Are you serious? You can't think of a reason a Blog named'ArseBlog' manages to attract traffic even without knowledge that it 'apparently' is about a British Soccer team?
Your Blog has the word'Girl' and the phrase'One track mind'..that should be good for a few thousand hits per week.
ArseBlog has the word'ARSE' in it..that should be good for a few hundred thousand per week...
Little Green Footballs is comprised of the words'Little,'Green',and 'Footballs'...seems to me LGF is one of the few sites that actually Works for and Deserves its traffic.
Posted by czarmangis | August 28, 2006 08:17 PM
Your Blog has the word'Girl' and the phrase'One track mind'..that should be good for a few thousand hits per week.
ArseBlog has the word'ARSE' in it..that should be good for a few hundred thousand per week...
You would be surprised how few search engine referrals arrive with the word 'arse'.
Less than 1% of search engine referrals come with the word 'arse', but 15% are for 'Arsenal' while the single biggest referrer is people searching for 'Arseblog'.
Posted by arseblogger | September 5, 2006 06:12 AM
The quality of traffic can be increased, sustained, and then can be kept on an upward moving motion by continuously publishing quality posts, and along with that, nurturing a community. I've often seen successful blogs having very vibrant commenters' community. I think any blog can increase traffic in spurts by breaking this new or that news, or by being "scandalous", but for long-term success, nothing can supersede good content.
Posted by Amrit Hallan | August 21, 2006 11:59 AM