The Power of the Medium Sized Blog

Joe Carter on the 5/150 Principle

...[w]e bloggers rarely appreciate the power we possess. Instead of being constantly amazed at the potential influence we wield, we carp and whine (if only to ourselves) that we don’t have the links of Glenn Reynolds or the site hits of Daily Kos. We believe that since thousands of people could be reading our blogs that we should have thousands of readers. If we don’t then we judge ourselves to be inadequate.

But how important are links and hits? Try this experiment: write down (a) a list of 10 blogs that are the most linked, (b) a list of 10 blogs that receive the most traffic, and (c) a list of 10 blogs that you regularly read that make you think for the equivalent of five minutes a day. Once you have your list you can check the links and the hits at the TTLB Ecosystem.

Now how many on (a) and (b) did you get right? How many of the ones on (a) and (b) are also on list (c)? My guess is that you were only able to name (at most) five of the ten blogs on the first two lists and that only one or two show up on your own list. What this shows is that measurements we often use to determine a blog’s “success” have little to do with their actual ability to influence.