The Pareto Principle and Blog Networks
Blog Networks have a problem. Do you go for that one hit site or do you go for the niche categories and fill out the long tail? At the beginning it looked as though Weblogs, Inc. was going to fill out the long tail, but as writers come and go (many times because of the Overjustification Effect) the smaller sites were left to wither and die, while the more mainstream sites caught on and grew. Leading the charge was Engadget and due to its success it was able to start moving into the long tail of technology with with Engadget HD and Engadget Mobile.
Following this was the expansion of the mini-Joystiq network with WoW Insider, DS Fanboy, Xbox 360 Fanboy and others. All of the content on these mini-sites could easily appear on Joystiq, but that causes a couple of problems.
- There is a lot of content hitting the Joystiq frontpage already and this would multiply that by a large amount causing people either to just give up on trying to stay updated or simply miss some items completely unless you configure the feed to include the 50 latest items.
- Lots of people just don’t care about all video game news and just want specific genres.
The mini-network addresses this and does so very well. In this instance, WIN has started with the big site approach and then moved on to the Long Tail. However, does the Pareto Principle apply in this case and if so can we learn from it?
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
I’m sure we have all heard of this rule in one form another and looking at the traffic numbers for the Joystiq network it seems their approach has been paying off. Over time Joystiq became part of the elite 20% with regards to traffic and reach and therefore reaching down further into the Long Tail began to make sense because Joystiq was able to push the traffic to those sites. Not many networks have this advantage and the only other one that comes to mind is Gawker Media.
Instead what we are seeing from many blog networks is rapid growth in all areas and simply believing they can play the numbers game. If you have enough sites eventually the traffic will build up to a level that allows for a critical mass of traffic sharing right? Well, not really, but it is easy to think that. Instead, what you get is a lot of little sites that can’t even begin to cover the Long Tail and although the common perception is that covering most of the Long Tail is a rewarding effort, simply being part of it is not enough.
So what do you do if you are a content network? It is definitely easier to start a new site instead of trying to make one a hit, but I think making one a hit is definitely more valuable than adding 50 new sites. You need to become part of the 20% of the Long Tail then you can worry about the rest. How does this apply to 9rules? It’s a bit different in my mind, because in some areas we do have the largest sites, while in others we might just cover a good portion of the Long Tail. However, we also have the 9rules site itself, which helps change things a bit.
Related reading:
Interesting article Scrivs. Nicely done.
I understand and appreciate the concept of the Pareto principle, but my belief has been that blogs take this concept to a whole new level. In other words, I believe that 10% of all blogs get 90% of the traffic, or even higher - possibly even 95/5. The ‘token’ blogs (TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Boing Boing) seem to appear a majority of blog rolls and garnered immense traffic.
In this day and age, the difference between an ‘A’ list blogger and a ‘B’ list blogger is substantial to say the least. For this very reason, I believe that the split is even more pronounced.
Cheers,
Aidan
By Aidan Henry on December 19, 2006 3:30 pm
Good observation Aidan and I’m glad you pointed out a common misconception of the principle. The principle isn’t there to definie 80/20, but suggests that anywhere you look you will find a ratio of a smaller group causing the large portion of the changes.
In the case of Web 2.0 blogs, TC is definitely on the left side of the curve, while everyone else is the right. However, I don’t think you can just look at one industry because when you do so you realize you have all the sites talking about the same thing so of course one site is going to dominate over another.
Looking at the blogosphere as a whole though you can definitely see the Pareto Principle in effect here and it makes more sense.
By Scrivs on December 19, 2006 3:35 pm
I absolutely agree with your argument that web 2.0 may be a specialty case. Between TC, Mashable, GigaOM, Read/Write Web, and Micropersuasion, it is my guess that these blogs garnered most of the traffic.
On a wider scale, however, I still see the skew as being more disproportional than people imagine. I think that networks like Gawker and Weblogs promote this imbalance via tight control and widespread inter-linking. In addition, ‘professional business practices’ ensure that blogs are updated on a regular basis, edited properly, and provide quality of the utmost level.
I’m finding it hard to effectively present my view in words, but I think you get the gist of it :)
Cheers,
Aidan
By Aidan Henry on December 19, 2006 3:58 pm
[...] Internally I’m sure we are all aware that we shouldn’t ignore the competition, but that doesn’t mean that externally we should show that we acknowledge them. For 9rules our competition is considered to be other content networks and blog networks so if I write an entry like the previous one it can be taken as writing about the competition. [...]
By How Do You Talk About the Competition? » Wisdump on December 19, 2006 5:47 pm
I think TechCrunch and CrunchGear are a perfect example. See http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=325
TechCrunch is sitting at #5 on Technorati, and they’ve gotten CrunchGreat to around #500 (and over 32000 RSS readers) since it opened in the summer.
By engtech on December 19, 2006 9:29 pm
Yes, Arrington definitely has a leg up with any new site he starts. I was withholding from using him as an example because he doesn’t really have a deep network yet, but you can definitely see the potential if he wishes to pursue something.
By Scrivs on December 19, 2006 10:24 pm