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October 5, 2003
Perseus on Weblog churn
Posted by Clay Shirky
Perseus has published a
much-blogged survey of weblogs, estimating that the churn rate for weblogs is roughly two-thirds, calculated by the number of weblogs that have not been updated for two months.
The other thing that caught my eye is that LiveJournal has a below-average abandonment rate. Though they do not interpret this finding other than to note it, my hunch is that the Friends feature (best people-link idea EVAR!) creates a social expectation and a social reward for continued involvement, unlike blogrolls.
It's great that the survey finally tries to put even a rough number on churn (the elephant in the room for most discussions of size and shape of the weblog world), but I do have two quibbles:
First, a methodological complaint: they make demographic assertions about gender and age, and then note that much of the data comes from LJ, which skews young and female. It's not even that we can say Perseus's demographic figures are wrong -- they are simply uninformative.
Second, an interpretive one: they call the
now familiar power-law curve an iceberg, with the most famous weblogs are the tip, and go on to a lot of interpretation of the normal weblog writers experience being nanoaudiences. This is true, of course, if the object of analysis is the weblog writer. For the weblog reader, on the other hand, the most popular weblogs are the normal ones. Both views are true, once the choice is made about whether to focus on writing or reading, but the Perseus study silently assumes that the normal weblog experience is writing a weblog, and so ignores the view from the other side of the browser.
Both of those are minor complaints, though, compared to the major milestone of having a benchmark for churn published, and, more importantly, for having the issue put front and center in discussions about the nature of weblogging in general.
Comments (6)
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1. Jens Alfke on October 5, 2003 11:22 PM writes...
A number of people create LiveJournal accounts (which include a journal) simply to be able to read "friends-only" posts by people they know, and/or to be able to post non-anonymous comments on their friends' posts. I'll bet a decent percentage of the so called "abandoned" blogs on LJ are of this form. (And one of the viral mechanisms driving the growth of LJ is that some people who signed up with only the above intentions actually end up getting the bug and starting a real journal.)
Permalink to Comment2. Jim Elve on October 6, 2003 9:54 AM writes...
As the proprietor of a blogging resource site and directory of blogs, www.blogscanada.ca, abandoned journals are a professional issue for me so I read the report with interest.
The Perseus folks at least follow their highly specualtive report with enough disclaimers to let the knowledgeable reader know that it is fairly meaningless. Not so with The Regster's story on the Perseus report: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33214.html.
As I've noted in other articles from the Register's Orlowski, he seems to have an axe to grind when it comes to blogging. This negative story fails to mention any of the many caveats included in the source material.
The survey itself is quite flawed. By only looking at hosted blogs and ignoring blogs served under their own domain, they essentially skimmed off the cream before making their anaylsis. I'm an avid blogger with two blogs that I update daily. In my role as a blog resource site operator, I also signed up for several lowcost or free services to simply test the products. After one post, I abandoned those. This makes me part of the vast dead pool, though I am far from it.
Jens point in the previous comment exposes another factor leading to the skewed statistics.
The survey does bring a pertinent issue to light. Many dead blogs do exist and are, indeed, a nuisance cluttering up the blogosphere. I can see that blog service providers, like Blogger, might gain a certain amount of traffic and possibly some new clients by keeping these dead pages active. My own thinking is that the negative aspects of serving outdated content outweigh the positives, though.
At BlogsCanada, we attempted to spider our database looking for dead blogs. The fact that blogs do not serve up 404's when dead, however, makes this a near impossibility. A dead blog's URL often delivers a page that essentially says, "Sorry that blog's no longer here. Maybe you'd like to start your own blog." Smart enough but annoying to people looking for real content.
As that iceberg grows, so grows the tip. A better sampling method would have shown a much more vibrant picture. To continue the iceberg analogy, as long as the unseen portion is more of an annoyance than a real danger, why not just explore and enjoy the ever-growing visible tip?
Permalink to Comment3. Clay Shirky on October 6, 2003 10:40 PM writes...
The fact of the matter, though, is that the first attempt to answer a question like this becomes the benchmark, no matter what the methodological flaws.
We all know that the basic pattern Perseus is trying to enumerate is real: the rate of abandonment of weblogs is high. (Jim, I take the Perseus study "dead pool" to be a pool of blogs and not bloggers. It is Mr. Orlowski who has turned the issue into one of personality, not Perseus.)
Simply throwing out reasons the figure is not accurate won't dissuade people from using their 66% number; nothing will now replace that figure except better data, so if you don't like the results of the Perseus study, the way to displace it is to improve it.
Permalink to Comment4. xian on October 9, 2003 2:22 AM writes...
At best, it helps to remind us all that the number of active blogs is more meaningful than the number of started blogs.
Permalink to Comment5. Ross Mayfield on October 23, 2003 3:03 AM writes...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/technology/circuits/23diar.html
Excerpt:
Clay Shirky, an adjunct assistant professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, said it was important to discuss the half-life of blogs even though the "numbers are threatening to some people." Referring to blog dropouts, he added, "The truth is, a churn rate of less than 80 percent on a technology growing this fast is very, very good."
Mr. Henning provided a number not released as part of the study: the growth in active blogs, rather than abandoned ones. Last year there were 1.62 million active blogs, according to Perseus's research. This year that number is expected to rise to 3.3 million. In 2004, Mr. Henning predicts, the figure will rise to 5.86 million. That's a number worth talking about.
Permalink to Comment6. money for business on February 28, 2004 12:01 AM writes...
great page...im sure i'll come back...best regards
Permalink to Commentmoney for business