Sharpe's Opinion

I told myself I wouldn’t talk about readership numbers. Ever. Not because I don’t have a high readership, although I suppose that probably makes some difference, but because I don’t see why anyone should really care.

However, lots of people do care about relative readership, and I think that makes it worthwhile to provide some perspective on what all of these visitor statistics that are bandied about at the start of every month actually mean.

The Competition Problem

Personally, I see publishing visitor stats as an utterly vacuous pursuit, carried over from the newspaper industry in a way which doesn’t really make sense. Visitor statistics allow – no, force – us to compare one blog with another by a metric which doesn’t actually mean anything. Here, watch this:

My unique visitor count was 2,861, around 1% of Guido’s, or 15% of Tom Harris’s. Charlotte Gore’s blog had a little over 50% more ‘unique visitors’ than Sharpe’s Opinion did last month, while Daniel1979 had just under half as many visitors.¹

You see what happened? Instantly, that made it sound like Charlotte’s blog is 50% more successful than mine, and that Guido’s is 10,000% more successful again, while I’ve been twice as successful as Daniel. It also made it sound like we’re in a competitive market, where each Unique Visitor is going to pick one blog on which to spend his/her unique visit for April.

In other words, just by making the comparison, we assume that everybody who came to Sharpe’s Opinion blog came here for the same reason – and that it’s the same reason that they would read Guido Fawkes, or Charlotte Gore, or Daniel1979.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, different people go to different sites for different reasons. In reality, probably 15% of Guido’s visitors in April only came because they saw his name in the paper over McBrideGate, and a fair proportion of them may never come back. In reality, almost a third of my visitors only came here because one of my posts has been on the front page of Google for ‘Flight Control tips’ – Flight Control being an immensely popular iPhone game that I mentioned briefly a while back. If I hadn’t mentioned Flight Control, I’d have around the same figures as Daniel!

The Multiple Markets

None of these blogs are really in competition at all. Everybody is actually serving different markets of different sizes. This makes comparisons between blogs on numbers alone about as useful as comparing the number of computers Apple sell to the number of dishwashers Bosch sell.

One of the numbers is going to be higher than the other, but it won’t be because of the quality or popularity of either company’s products – it’ll be because they’re fundamentally different markets.

To show what I mean, let’s do a little light analysis. Here’s the Top Six² blogs in the UK according to Wikio:

Starting at the top, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale’s Diary have wide appeal – Guido is the anti-politics gossiper, Iain is the pro-politics gossiper. Their market is cross-party, despite both being right-of-centre, because gossip is of universally interesting to people who are interested in gossip³.

Third and Fourth, Liberal Conspiracy and ConservativeHome both serve separate slices of the market – people who are interested in talking about ‘left’ philosophy and people who are interested in discussing ‘right’ philosophy respectively. There may be huge crossover with the ‘gossip’ readers, but both Liberal Conspiracy and ConservativeHome are more niche than Iain or Guido.

Between the ‘philosophical powerhouse’ blogs is politicalbetting.com, where people go to read deep analysis of opinion polls and get odds and tips for betting on matters political. This has cross-party appeal – but, crucially, serves a totally different market to Iain or Guido or the others.

Liberal Democrat Voice, which falls into the same category as Liberal Conspiracy and ConservativeHome is just off the list in 6th place. Not really surprising when you consider that there are fewer Lib Dem supporters in the country than there are lefties or righties – but that’s very much the point I’m making. It matters not whether or not Lib Dem Voice is better written or more interesting than ConservativeHome – their niche is smaller and so they come lower in the rankings.

What’s striking when you look at it like that is that the ranking of each one of these blogs is not really related to their quality at all. I would argue that each are very high quality in their own ways. Their rankings, however, reflect the popularity of the type of content they create.

The Non-Zero-Sum Game

The next problem with comparing stats is that blogging is not a zero-sum game. Somebody who reads Guido’s blog isn’t going to stop reading Iain Dale’s. Even blogs who serve the same market as each other aren’t competing for visitors – there’s no reason to assume that nobody reads more than one gossip blog. I read all six of those Wikio top-ranked blogs, and many more besides.

It’s actually quite the opposite of a zero-sum game. Because of the pervasive link-friendly culture of the blogosphere, every person who reads Iain Dale’s blog is a person more likely to end up reading other blogs. Iain paid me the immense compliment of linking to one of my posts recently and almost immediately some 450 people came flocking to this site. By putting me in a list, he shared his readership with me – and me with his readership. Even better, a hundred or so of those people followed a link over to Charlotte’s blog. We both benefited (in visitor terms) from Iain’s generosity.

The Envy

I’ve (hopefully) shown that we’re not competing with each other. In an ideal blogosphere, every blog would serve a different niche and every one would be read by exactly the number of people who are interested in what they have to say.

What’s left, however, is the stats-envy. I think this is going to hang around for as long as people publish their statistics. All I can say is, if you’re unhappy that Guido has a lager readership than you do, though, you’re doing it wrong.

Don’t worry about who has more readers than you, instead carve out your own niche, and write for the people who are interested in reading about it. Find your obsession, multiply it by your voice, and write about it as much as you can. Your readership will only be as large as your niche, but if you can be the best in your own category, that’s far better than being an also-ran copy of a more mainstream blog.

1. I picked Charlotte and Daniel almost at random by virtue of them actually publishing their stats and being in the same rough ballpark readership as me. [↩]
2. I chose six because I wanted to make a point about Lib Dem Voice, not to shun Devil’s Kitchen who is in seventh – there’s an interesting point about DK in that his success shows how popular libertarianism is on the internet. [↩]
3. I know gossip may or may not be the right word – I mean it in terms of Iain and Guido talk about events and people, not ideas and philosophies [↩]