New Media Economics

As I prepare to write an essay on the internet as an attention economy, the resource that has ended up being the most useful is this old post over at Mister Snitch!, a blog that has been for all intents and purposes inactive for well over a year. Since I first noticed it, my respect for the writer has only increased. It has taken me this long to really return to it with a substantive criticism; but the manner in which my perspective has been refined owes much to ideas inspired by that post.

The premise of the post is as follows:

Blogging resembles investment in that the blogger invests time and energy in hopes of a return. Bloggers' return on investment is readers.

With this as the starting assumption, Mister Snitch built up seven models of blogging "styles", describing each as a function of how it was intended to attract readers. In other words, he describes seven methods by which bloggers supposedly offer something of potential value to readers.

This is an oversimplification of the relationship of supply and demand in blogging. In this analysis, readers constitute the "demand" side and bloggers the "supply" side. From that perspective, his styles make sense--for they are entirely the slave of readers. Whether it's keeping readers updated on the flavors of the moment, creating a haven for like-minded people, or providing information for people in particular localities. The point is the same--give readers what they want.

What he failed to recognize was that a blog is itself a commodity--there exists a demand for blogs, and hosts such as Blogger and Wordpress provide a supply of them. Snitch's speculation was perhaps quite perceptive if one takes it as an attempt to explain what sorts of things a reader might value about a blog. However, it did not even attempt to analyze why a person might value the act of blogging--offering only the assumption that it was because they wanted readers, and nothing more.

By far the greatest insight that he had to offer was the notion of the long tail of blogging.

The long-tail blogger is the rarest of successful breeds. This style requires consistent blogging over a long period of time (hence the rarity in a fairly new medium). As we have noted in previous posts, blogging is heavily favored by search engines in the current Internet cultural environment. A classic long-tail blogger such as Dustbury gets a very respectable audience (currently approaching 1,000 unique visits a day) because the site has been commenting on popular culture, steadily and succinctly, for over nine and a half years. A look at Charles' site stats tells the story: Out of every 1,000 hits, about 70% come to the site's front page or a current post. The remainder are links that trickle in - one, two, three at a time - for archived posts.

Once again, I think that the way in which this was presented is flawed--it treats this as a "style" that can be "successful" in attracting readers, much in the way that a model of business can be successful in attracting customers.

Rather than treat these things as conscious decisions that have positive or negative outcomes, one ought to simply observe the patterns themselves. On the one hand, there are people who value blogging more than they value the other activities they could spend that time on. On the other hand, the longer that they post, on any subject, the more likely that their blog will be found through search engines.

So even if a blog is relatively unnoticed or attracts no substantial amount of regular readers, it will in all likelihood experience a steady increase in traffic over the extreme long term.

Not all of the returns one gets from investing one's time in blogging can be summarized by a desire for readers. Yet it is highly likely that there exists people for whom blogging is only valuable enough to spend time on if their readership is above a certain minimum. The fact that the proportion of blogs to the proportion of time people are willing to spend reading is huge means that most blogs will only get a tiny fraction of the overall readership. Considering these two ideas--the fact that most blogs will have a small readership, and that many people may have a minimum level of readership to give enough value to their blogging--and we may have isolated an important cause for the large number of abandoned blogs.

In April of 2006, for instance, Technorati stated that 55% of all blogs were still active 3 months after they were created. Flipping that around, it means that 45% of blogs at that point in time were not even making it past their third month.

Yet again I must insist that we not attribute "blog failure" to lack of readership entirely. Sometimes it is the opposite. Sometimes popular bloggers get tired of feeling like they need to keep posting to maintain their readership; and either temporarily or permanently close shop.

Just as common are those bloggers who feel that they have reached a point where their writing is creating a conflict of interest with their work. Chrenkoff is a good example of that, and he had an immense readership base.

Arguing blogging as something that one does in order to gain readership suffers from the same logical errors as arguing that people only going into a particular field of work for the money. When someone has multiple options for the fields that they will go into, obviously how much one values money cannot be the sole factor on which a decision is made. After all, if that were the case, no one would choose to be a painter, or a novelist, or a teacher for that matter--there are many fields in which one could devote one's time to gaining experience in that are more promising in terms of monetary income.

Likewise, if what people wanted was purely readers, then why would people get Livejournals on which you can restrict access to all but a select few; and why would anyone talk about obscure things like finite mathematics or anything technical at all? Heck, why would we talk about anything but sex, for that matter. Just write about sex and put up some naked pictures you copied from other websites, and you're set.

What you blog about is usually a function of what your interests are, which is just another way of saying what it is that you value. How much people value readers varies from person to person--for some people, getting too many readers can be undesirable, if it results either in having to pay for more bandwidth or a constant stream of reader e-mails.

The wonderful thing about the long tail of blogging is that it means that people like me, for whom large readership is only of marginal importance, I can write about as many obscure topics as I wish, as infrequently as I feel like, and if I make sure to do it continually over time, I can still look forward to an increase in readership. Yet even during those months where readership is particularly low, I come back to this blog because it I enjoy a number of things about writing through this medium.

People speak of a blurring between the consumers and the producers; what they ought to say is that this blurring is occurring within a single industry. The consumers have always been producers as well--because in order to pay for what they consume, they need to produce something that they exchange for money. Thus, the economics of the new media looks pretty much the same as the economics of the old media; the ratios have shifted but the mechanics remain unchanged.