Newsosaur: Blog links worth more than Big Media?
(Pat Woodford pointed this one out – thanks!)
Alan Mutter, one of my favorite reads, had a post entitled “Dead animals, large and small” in which he notes that last week a link from an artist’s blog brought in 1,000 links, where as links in both Forbes.com and Businessweek.com netted one solitary visit.
Three weeks ago, Newsosaur’s admittedly modest traffic spiked to an all-time daily high of more than 1,000 visits as the result of this link from a blog called, I kid you not, Small Dead Animals.
Two weeks ago, by contrast, Forbes and Business Week each quoted Newsosaur on their websites, and those links resulted in a single, solitary hit from a Business Week reader.
So, there you have it: Small Dead Animals top Large Ones by 1,000 to 1.
This begs the question: if the web is supposedly the savior of print publications, then wouldn’t this denoted that the content isn’t getting read, or at least it isn’t getting read in depth?
For my money, I believe this is further evidence of the fundamental difference in the way people read online vs. in print. Long traditional articles more infrequently are read in their entirety. We’ve become accustomed to pithy, short posts in blogs, vs. the long and more challenging full blown fact-fact checked and copy edited article.
4 thoughts on “Newsosaur: Blog links worth more than Big Media?”
Very interesting. This has me scratching my head. Even though I try to write conversationally, my profession dictates that before I publication every one of my posts goes through a compliance review process. Maybe there is a blend of old and new media yet to develop?
Yes, I agree completely. We are about to re-learn the value of journalistic ethics, fact checking, and the editorial process the hard way…
Bah. You still don’t get it.
The notion that blogs lack fact-checking is a canard. They don’t. We simply function in a different – and transparent – manner.
I invite you to read this:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006355.html
It’s a post in which I invite my readers to share their professions. After the first 600 responses, fully 10% had identified themselves as engineers.
Now, consider the bridge failure in Minneapolis a week ago. How would my readership’s “fact checking” capacity rate against the resources of the Strib?
Superior, would be my guess. But more importantly, that transparency brings with it a high degree of confidence – and reader loyalty. So when I provide readers with a link, they tend to read it.
Tell that to Apple who lost 4b in marketcap due to a bogus post at Engadget. Or more likely their team of lawyers.
TechCrunch Article
You may check your facts, but I can assure most do not. Heck I don’t check my facts the way they would be checked if they were in a for print paper. Some errors need to be caught before they happen, not corrected after via an edit button.