Should bloggers be more transparent about their traffic and engagement scores?
June 1st, 2010 by Daniel Young | Filed under Blogging, Media, Social media.There are encouraging signs that blogging is gaining more traction in Australia.
Take for example, the Telstra Social Review program, a competition whereby Australians with a social media presences could ‘compete’ (in loose terms) for the chance to be one of 25 social reviewers. The final 25 were each given a HTC handset and asked to review it for 2 weeks.
There is nothing new about this initiative in some respects – it is essentially a blogger relations program – but the public nature of the Telstra ‘experiment’ represents a very different approach. Good blogger relations practitioners will insist on full disclosure but its rare for an organisation to PR this kind of program in the way that Telstra did.
As a result, Telstra has telegraphed its respect for blogging (as well as other forms of social media) and I believe that other Australian corporations will sit up and take notice.
I believe that ‘commercial confidence’ in blogging is a requirement for blogging if it is to acheive genuine mainstream acceptance. This ‘commerial confidence’ could take many forms including advertising and sponsorship investment, collaboration, access, insights or simply advocacy.
The blogging community is challenged however by a fundamental lack of transparency.
Readership data underpins the traditional media sector, it provides the business justification for advertising spend and PR programs. In a section of the media where the glossy finish of the product (or lack of it ) bares little or no relationship to its reach and influence, its essential that proprietors become more open about their traffic and engagement scores.
Commercial (business) decisions are based on an assessment of risk over opportunity. The blogging community in Australia needs to help its potential partners understand the opportunity.
That might sound like a scary proposition for a young blog with low traffic scores today. But remember this. At some point, consumption of print media will be a small proportion of what is consumed online. Transparency can help you build trusted relationships with potential commerical supporters today, for the future.
What do you think? Do you agree? If not, why not?
Is it wrong to assume that all blogs have a commercial imperative?
Should bloggers be open and transparent about their number of readers, time spent, uniques?
If so, what data should they share?
Tags: australia, Blogging, Blogs, Commercial, mainstream, social, telstra, transparency
Subscribe Feed (RSS)
Many of the 25 people in the Telstra experiment do not have a commercial imperative for their blogs and are therefore unlikely to bother displaying traffic data.
My readership data is open but that’s because my sites are run on a commercial basis, have good readership data and I want people to know that
But even those figures are under-counting because discussion seems to have shifted in the last year or two from blog comments to people discussing my blog posts with me on Twitter, Facebook and specialist community of interest forums like Whirlpool and this is very hard to measure
Websites are inherently not suited to having their readership/influence measured en masse and compared to other sites
PR/Comms people will have to manually sift through sites and determine who has a lot of readers/influence rather than relying on automated measures and top 100 lists
Thanks for sharing your view Neerav.
Even in cases where the blog does not have a commercial objective, I believe that there is a strong argument for openly sharing traffic figures, if only so that we can gain an accurate picture about the state of the blogosphere.
I should probably start walking the talk!!
Should bloggers display traffic data? I presume you must be talking about the advertiser / marketing consultant’s perspective.
Because from the (non-commercial) blogger’s or reader’s persepctive – I would suggest – they don’t care. Like other media (eg newspapers), I read what I am interested in/like, and frankly wouldnt have a clue as to the circulation figures of the paper i pick up in the morning. I think blogs are the same – natural market forces will determine how popular a blog is.
I agree if you have a commercial blog (Eureka Report by Alan Kohler for example), then it would be useful for advertisers to know the traffic data. But as a reader i subscribe to that blog and pay my money because I value what I get, and wouldnt know or care if it has 50 or 50,000 subsribers. My ‘commercial confidence’ is derived by the quality of the product, not by the readership numbers.
I think traffic data is only of interest to commercial bloggers and advertisers who want to advertise on those blogs. I dont think there is a need to publish stats on every blog to establish credibility. I wonder how many people read this blog? Probably not a lot, but that doesnt make the discussions irrelevant or not credible.
LA
At the moment, there is no single standard for ranking blogs – either on a qual. or quant. basis and I believe that this is required in order for blogging to remain sustainable.
Its not about the commercialisation of every blogger, that would be horrible – the indepedence of bloggers is what makes this form of media so compelling. The question is: How sustainable is blogging in its current form over the long term (its a slightly different situation if you’re paying for a subscription).
I think an underlying system for measuring influence would help sustain this form of media – I agree that traffic data is just one measure and that it should be combined with other qual measures – any ideas what they might be?
Finally, you’re right, the traffic to this blog is very small between 20 and 60 visitors a day on average (not including myself). I am quite comfortable sharing those figures. I’m lucky that my readership is of such a high quality.
By the way LA, you may not care about the circulation figures of your daily newspaper but I can tell you that they do and so do their advertisers (ie. the people that make it possible for them to print a newspaper in the first place). That figure and the related data is an absolutely crucial aspect of that section of the media.
Yes youre right the newspapers would care, so probably not a good example because I shouldnt compare newspapers to online media as the cost models are vastly different. A newspapers gains the majority of revenue from advertising, not subscriptions, so of course circulation figures are important to them. Also explains why they hand out free SMH’s nearly everywhere you look (McDonalds, Sporting games, Fitness Firsts, etc).
But using my experience with eureka report as an example, there are next to know ads, and its an expensive subscription (about $300 per year). I’d say 90% of their revenue is based on subscriptions, not advertising, hence circulation is less important here, its quality of journalism and financial insights, etc that I pay for.
I suppose your question is relevant for certain parts of the blogosphere, not all. I assert that circulation numbers (and similar measures) are not needed for a successful and thriving business model (eureka report being an example). Maybe we need to segment the online world into different types of businesses/models and ask this queston again.
“Understanding the opportunity” is the most important point made in this post.