how popular are you?
By Pat Law™ • Nov 30th, 2008 • Category: FeaturesWith today’s obscene standards of media manipulation, both on- and off-line, committed by both Professionals and Public alike, Perception IS Truth. Or is it?
How popular do you think your blog is? How popular do you think you are, as a result of your blog? At risk of sounding like an obnoxious smuck-a-duck (which I do recognize I can be), here’s how popular I know my blog is:
• At the gala premier of Wilde, the biographical film of literature genius Oscar Wilde, the girl sitting next to me exclaimed, “Are you Pat Law? My friends (motions to the line of people to the right) and I read your blog!” Shocked, I offered an impressive stutter of a greeting. And an ohmygodshouldioutmywife introduction to Mrs Law on my left. O, I apologise for the lacklustre greeting.
• Edelman USA, official Agency of Record to my former client, dropped an email to the entire village at the latter’s regional office about my blog, not realising I serviced the brand too. Haha.
• Guy Kawasaki twittered about my blog. Oh cut me some slack. Like you won’t plug this if he did the same to you.
• The former Global Executive Creative Director of DRAFTFCB is a fan of my blog. As is the President of Arc Worldwide/ Leo Burnett Chicago. The Creative Director of MediaCorp too. And the lovely Marketing Director of Nike Japan. I must go win Linda Locke, the Godmother of Advertising, over soon.
• A-list blogger with a devil-may-care attitude Cowboy Caleb wished me happy birthday on his blog. Sniff.
• My web host shut my site down for a day last week because I was experiencing too much traffic and was single-handedly causing others to not be able to log in to theirs. Cheebye. Hello Mr Dedicated Server. How do you do?
• I get hate mails, and plenty of others from lesbians outing themselves to me instead of their family.
• My friends replace “talk soon” with “are you going to blog about this?”.
Popular hor? Actually, according to ://URLFAN… NO. Here’s my ranking amongst 3,783,534 websites, parsing 124,381,326 blog posts from 2,064,406 blog feeds.
://URLFAN provides website publishers with a useful tool in tracking their websites and how their content is reference by other websites. Designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time, it cultivates the content of millions of RSS feeds, parsing billions of pieces of information to make a transparent ranking based on that data. And that’s how you can discover who’s a fan of your blog.
While most tracking services rank based on the traffic of a website, ://URLFAN does it differently by ranking you against RSS feeds. I won’t go as far as to agree with them that they offer a more accurate way to measure popularity because traffic and RSS feeds are almost, if I may say, inversely related. For example, if I have your blog content pulled into my Google Reader, there is a high chance I will not bother to visit your site organically and provide you with a hit in traffic.
That said, I do appreciate the insights that ://URLFAN provides with its ranking algorithm. I got curious, and decided to track the following international and local blogs. Check them out.
INTERNATIONAL
1. ReadWriteWeb
2. ProBlogger
View Stats | View Site
3. Scobleizer
LOCAL
1. theory.isthereason
2. Yongfook
View Stats | View Site
3. Xiaxue
4. Design Sojourn
5. Cowboy Caleb
6. Sheylara
7. Popagandhi
8. Claudia.sg
View Stats | View Site
9. Unique Frequency
10. DK
11. Dawn Yang
What’s your takeaways on this? Here’s mine.
• Dawn Yang is severely overrated. Either that or her readers haven’t heard of RSS.
• You don’t need to physically mingle at blog networking sessions to be popular. Such can be said for Yongfook (based in Japan), Cowboy Caleb (based in the skies half the time) and Popagandhi (based in Dubai).
• We prefer the smarter stuff. I’m pleasantly surprised by Kevin Lim’s theory.isthereason blog.
• Being part of a community helps. Claudia is what I’ll classify as a Creator cum Connector. While she creates content for her blog, she also connects by means of being part of the Social Media Breakfast crew. In the last SMB event which I attended as a panellist, I must’ve received about 10 trackbacks to my blog. Imagine the amount she gets as a crew member.
I believe that a sound analysis on a blog’s popularity can only be made after comparing both traffic and RSS feeds. Additionally, I believe the term popularity has to be further defined. I mean, if I decide to bitch about 20 famous bloggers and they start linking me back with a nasty post about me, does the sudden surge in mentions equate to my increase in popularity? I doubt so. Also, by discounting traffic, I do think that the ranking by ://URLFAN is somewhat flawed. Nonetheless, a great start to a potential tracking leader.
Do note that the statistics published here were tracked only in the last 24 hours. Quite naturally, with anything online, we work on perpetual data. For the most updated statistics, please visit ://URLFAN.
Front page image courtesy of Matt Dinerstein.
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Pat Law™is a Digital Strategist who, in her time in the Adland, has marketed a range of global brands including adidas, Cadbury Schweppes, Chrysler, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Johnnie Walker, L’Oréal, and Royal Salute. A self-confessed Social Media junkie, Pat has since joined the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR. Pat also writes for iSh, LOTL International, and Singapore Architect.
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[...] How popular are you as a blogger? A very intrusting look into some detailed stuff I never really considered. It could only have come from social media rock star PatLaw. [...]
Popularity and notoriety is different I guess. But some people would love to lump them all together in one big “these people know me” chunk.
Wow! Pat you’re really popular leh! Must learn more from you! When free for coffee?
Thanks for the mention too. Yes, being part of communities does help. I’ve to admit, at the very beginning of my participation in Ping.sg community, I volunteer alot of my time to help take photos at their outings and this helped generate lots of traffic, ranking, links and what not. But after awhile, I just did it cause I enjoy taking photos for these great people whom now many have become close friends of mine.
Being online is not just about the content. One has to be connected and if possible active too. I hope more will start stepping out and up so that we can make the online space more interesting and vibrant.
popularity is a fun metric and all but it would be interesting to see what popularity actually translates to, which will require digging deeper.
you touched on it with your point about traffic or keyword-mentions not necessarily relating to popularity. you can go further and say that popularity doesn’t necessarily translate to influence. or influence not translating to revenue.
you could have a high traffic blog in a cheap keyword market and make less revenue than the next fellow with his average-traffic, expensive keyword niche blog with the latter doing better ad sales. or you could be some novelty blogspot blogger posting up dirty stories every day with massive blogosphere buzz but no marketing sense to monetise it.
popularity extrapolated from traffic and mentions is fun to look at, but it’s difficult to translate well into a meaningful business context. it’s the kind of metric that online advertisers who still think “brand awareness” is an important metric will love, because it gives them a way of measuring the success of their broken, broadcast media-style ads that don’t actually sell anything directly.
OOOH SNAP.
Anyway you probably know all this, I just wanted to try to sound clever.
Hello Pat. Clever way of eliciting popularity; by welcoming yourself in the company of giants.
I’m seeing different generations of bloggers in Singapore, so some of us would naturally have more traction than others (even if they’re less interesting like myself!). While we do see the rare overnight sensations, whether a blogger sustains his readers’ interests for long is something that is evenly distributed across the blogging populace. For instance, as you’ll see from my chart, I’m slowly bowing out since I’ve been blogging less intensely due to work pressure (I find twitter-addiction taking over).
As Yongfook alluded to with what i believe is his stab at the long tail effect, popularity is ultimately relative. There’s also network density, where even someone with a small network may have strong links, versus having a big network with weak links. Someone like Claudia has a lot of network centrality due to her interest and social role. Popularity numbers are merely a convenient indicator, though they are most useful if tracked over time. By seeing the trends, we can discover the differences that make the difference.
FYI: If you find yourself being asked if you’re Pat Law quite frequently in public, then congratulations: You’re a microcelebrity! See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-12/st_thompson
Hey claudia,
Actually no, I’m a far cry form most of you guys. Which is ok, that isn’t quite as important to me as having our little Social Media realm grow steadily with quality beyond quantity.
Hey yongfook,
I second your thoughts on this. Ironic in a way, isn’t it? For blogs to grow, we find ourselves wondering if we need to return to our traditional roots - where all publications are audited and having lower circulation does not necessarily be a bad thing if the nature of the magazine is niche and has a targeted audience.
Someone should write an online brand auditing script for this. Yes, big hint, Mr SweetCron.
Hi Kevin,
Naw, I drive my traffic to my site by means of SEO and selective plugs via portals, not individual blogs. The intention here was purely educational really. If I want to elicit popularity, I’ll plug a live web cam of my wife and I making out, no? I don’t mind the preconceived judgment you have about me - we bloggers tend to do that consciously and subconsciously. Else, I don’t see how we form a personal opinion.
On the contrary, based on RSS feeds alone, you’re tops on the URLFAN and I won’t discount that. Time to go track you on Twitter. And everything else.
Popularity ain’t nothing unless you’re talking about increasing personal brand awareness. I suppose, without my blog, I won’t be seeing actual published works in decent non-trashy magazines. That aside, I don’t quite understand the hype over being a microcelebrity of any sort. For fucks sakes, at the end of the day, we’re all humans.
Fame can be fleeting. I’ve done stories in ST where we hype one company/event to the moons and it dies the next moment the vicarious eyes turn elsewhere. Are the stories less relevant? Nope, but often the media feeds the mob in a tandem dance on the search for the next freshest thrill kill.
I’ve been wined and dined when I was a journalist, and lots of the fawning died down the moment you switch to a smaller pub. Only to have the unctuous charm turned on again when I ended up doing PR agency shopping with my boss when I was in-house at a MNC.
What I value are peers (PR and journalists) who have treated me with professional respect and courtesy. I’m indebted to my ex-bosses (both PR and journalism) who have taught me stuff. And perhaps most importantly, that I serve up something useful to the audience that I write for.
If you’re good at what you do, you will gain respected in the field you’re in, something to me that is more meaningful. Fame is a secondary by-product. My 2 cents.
And Design Sojourn comes in with a sliding tackle for the WIN! Hah-hah.
Actually I am pleasantly surprised, I never considered I will be anywhere up in the charts, and Pat I was lost in thought and forgot to mentioned that I don’t get very much more traffic monthly than you. About average 10-20K more monthly.
I am almost as popular as Xiaxue! Hurrayyy! But seriously, as we discussed, I am a true believer of quality rather than quantity. If you write a gossip blog that you get 10K hits a day, you probably rank nowhere compared to the kings like those in Gawker media. But if you write a nich blog, get 1K hits a day, AND corner the market say via google ranking, you win.
Thanks for the props Pat!
Now if only all bloggers think the same. All humans, for that matter. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Chi-Loong. Apologies for not being able to attend SMB. I was still in my boxers and tank top at 1230h!
Yes, quality over quantity for me as well, DT. As I’ve mentioned to you, I appreciate your blog for being niche, and you don’t find many of those in Singapore. Hell, mine’s not niche at all too. It was my pleasure meeting you last night really. Finally! A face to a well-respected blog! I hope to see you around soon.