I chose to examine both the Userland Community Server (top 100 Radio sites ranked by raw page-reads), and Blogging Ecosystem (top 501 sites ranked by number of inbound and outbound referrers) Note that both fit a steep 'hockey-stick' curve that is characteristic of power-law distributions - that is to say a few sites have a large number of hits and inbound links and a large number of sites have a few. More on this in a bit.

In particular, I wanted to know if there were correlations between things I control (frequency and length of posts and outbound links), and things I don't control (inbound links and other influences). So here's what I found (and this is hardly scientifically conclusive given that it's a one-off):

Strongest correlation? Celebrity. On Userland's top 10, not counting the number one, a safe-sex-advice site, 2 through 10 are sites by people who are relatively famous (like Adam Curry and Ray Ozzie), are managers of well-known products (like Mac OS X), are published on media sites (like Jon Udell at Infoworld) or are well-known technologists.

Inbound links correlate well: 6 of the To 10 Userland sites are on the Top 501 list on Blogging Ecosystem (all are in the top half of the list), while only 2 of the middle 10 (positions 45 to 55) and only 1 on the bottom 10. Interestingly, position on Blogging Ecosystem correlates only loosely to position on the Userland list - some highly rated 'hits' sites are lower on the 'links' list and vice versa.

Outbound links: almost no correlation. None of the top ten sites figures on Blogging Ecosystem's 'outbound links' list, whereas 1 middle-ten and 1 bottom-ten site do.

Frequency of posts: is overwhelmed by celebrity, but may be important for non-celebs. 5 of the top 10 post daily, as do 7 of the middle ten and 4 of the bottom ten. Ray Ozzie's site hasn't updated since November 17, and before that was only updated about once a week. Ken Bereskin's OS X site updates 2 or 3 times a week. Interestingly, Carol Strossen's site (she's a Wall Street Journal editor and book author) is routinely in the top 25 on Userland even though it hasn't been updated since September 15.

Length of posts: there is a faint correlation between long posts and position on the Userland list. 4 of the top 10 typically feature long posts, while it's 2 in the middle 10 and only 1 on the bottom 10. I would have thought that domain experts who offer original content, as opposed to sites that offer lots of snippets that can be found elsewhere, would tend to be more popular, but they are in the minority.

Power law: HP researcher Bernardo Huberman discovered that many aspects of the Web obey a so-called 'power law' distribution - one in which there are a few members of the set with a very large rating, and a large number of members with a very low rating. (E.g. the distribution of wealth among humans displays this behavior: a few have billions, and billions have very little). It's not terribly surprising that a subset of the Web's content, Weblogs, display the behavior of the larger Web.

Results? If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well. Encourage inbound links, but don't worry about outbound.

More analysis in a later post... time for lunch...
Comments 7:57:25 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures