What is the key to becoming a popular investment blogger?
Post
A LOT
I wanted to take a look at the top 50 or so investment bloggers, and see if there is any correlation between number of investment posts and traffic to the site. (The end of the post includes the top 50 or so blogs I included off Newsflashr.) My thoughts were that, regardless of post quality, traffic would be generated purely by posting frequency. Kind of what I call the “CNBC throw as much useless information at you as possible” model.
Now, I certainly read most of these blogs, and derive a great deal of benefit from a few. I certainly don’t have the time or desire to blog all day (good for my clients), and can barely manage about 3 posts a week.
So, I sent my assistant in India (via Brickwork) a project to count all the blog posts for these blogs, and then record the number of visits in the month of October.
Key findings:
-The correlation between # of posts and site visits is a very high .86.
-The four most frequent posters (including an astonishing 537 posts for #1 in October), account for over HALF of all traffic.
-A blogger needs to post at least twice a day to garner respectable traffic.
-Bloggers that post over 2 posts a day garner a whopping median traffic of 55k/month (and average visits of 140k/month).
-Bloggers that post under 2 posts a day garner a measly median traffic of 9k/month.
-Bloggers that post under 1 post a day garner a measly median traffic of 6k/month.
There are certainly exceptions to the findings. The Kirk Report doesn’t post a ton, but has a subscription offering as well as lengthy aggregation posts. dShort doesn’t post a lot, but his high quality charts more than make up for it. On the other hand, a few of these blogs have multiple authors as well.
Below is a chart of traffic vs. posts (with a nice R-squared of 0.74) for the month of October:
For some reason I couldn’t get data on these blogs (and also didn’t include Clusterstock boys because they have so many different sites):
| Daily Options | http://www.dailyoptionsreport.com/ |
| Humble Student | http://humblestudentofthemarkets.blogspot.com/ |
| Disciplined Investing | http://disciplinedinvesting.blogspot.com/ |
| Investment Linebacker | http://investmentlinebacker.blogspot.com/ |
| 10Q | http://www.10qdetective.blogspot.com/ |
| The Float | http://thefloat.typepad.com/ |
| Designing Better Futures | http://nickgogerty.typepad.com/designing_better_futures/ |
| Empirical Finance | http://empiricalfinanceresearch.blogspot.com/ |
| Market Sci | http://marketsci.wordpress.com/ |
Blogs in the study:
Interesting analysis. Of course, my first thought on seeing the chart is that much of your high correlation is driven by the one huge outlier. Also, you do have a bit of a part-whole correlation problem here (considering that given the same number of visitors more posts = more views); I would be interested in seeing the correlation using unique visitors (I don't think that data is available, though).
conclusions were the same when i removed #1. i can do uniques…let me take a look
Actually, even unique visitors has the same problem, because the more posts there are, the more people will run across it from links, searches, etc. Now visitors per page, the number of people that see each post/page, would be interesting.
That analysis would likely find the same thing. I think I've just explained the reason why the most frequent posters are more popular: they have more content to get linked to and found with searches. With my little trading blog, about 40% of my 700 daily visitors are new … so to grow my visitors I need to add more content that will get linked and searched for.
uniques over 95% correlated with total visitors
Thanks for including me (Daily Options Report). I switched from Blogger to my own site a few month's ago so perhaps I don't have enough data in the system? But….I would fit perfectly in your numbers, I post about 3x per day and get 50K hits or so per month.
“-Bloggers that post under 2 posts a day garner a measly median traffic of 9k/month.
-Bloggers that post under 2 posts a day garner a measly median traffic of 6k/month.”
I'm guessing the second one is supposed to be under 1 post/day?
And how come I'm not on this list? I'm at #20 on Newsflashr and I can't get no love?
fixed, thanks.
i'm not sure, Brickwork couldn't figure out how to count some of the blogs (yours has multiple columns, etc.) one of the drawbacks of outsourcing of course…
I can see that since only my most recent post shows up on the front page (though he/she could have looked to the RSS). For your study, I generally post 1/day on market days and I'm running just over 15,000 visits (12,500 unique) and 23,500 page views per month, according to Google.
Where did the data come from for traffic to the sites?
Compete
Not necessarily a huge surprise, but very interesting to look at it broken down like that. I think I remember Felix Salmon opining on how quantity > quality in the blogosphere if you want to generate traffic. Makes sense, but a shame in that it means content becomes watered down.
Thanks for including my site in the study. I used to read Barry's Big Picture blog but stopped when he began featuring guest writers and there started to be too many posts showing up in my feedreader. It's kind of like Twitter — if someone tweets too much, I unfollow them. If a blog generates too many posts, I stop reading them. ~C. Maoxian
It's my belief that the new media, which had its origins grounded in the dislike of traditional media outlets, is going through the same debasement process. If it is true that content gets eyeballs, as fox, msnbc, and others know well, then the bloggers who manufacture the most content win. In fact, manufacturing content becomes more important than the content itsself, which leads us full circle to the problems of traditional media.
Looks way too noisy to me. Too little data points beyond 100 (posts? Pls label graph axes) to draw any conclusion.
Also, linear fit? Looks more like any growth curve – a sigmoid, but there just isn't enough data to conclude.
How about paying some students to hand label 1000 posts based on :
– timely (time between the content timing of the post and posting time)
– actionable (can you buy/sell based on this)
I think there might be some stuff there.
Give me one actionable and timely information a day, and I can guarantee high readership
akaip makes some good points. A linear regression might not be called for. What does it look like when you winsorize the top 5 outliers? Also how are RSS feed reader aggregates accounted for?
Interesting data. I have enjoyed your recent push to a higher post rate btw. For comparison with the rest of the blogosphere technorati ranks Zero Hedge at #86 overall for blogs, and Big Picture is #100. (http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/page-4/)
Tim at the Four Hour blog takes the opposite approach where he tries to get as much readership as possible out of good quality but infrequent posts. http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/29...
One thing that I wouldn't copy from him is that the comments on his blog seem to be filtered so that the conversation is totally one-sided. Try posting “Tim you are wrong for these reasons…” ;-> Also he isn't ranked in the top 100 by technorati…
There is a big move down today in the stock market.
But there was a way to make money from this move, if only your DJIA index timing signal told you TWO DAYS AGO that the market is in correction mode.
admin
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Mebane, this is a very interesting analysis. Thanks for including my site.
Two questions jump out at me: 1. for which sites do you think that high readership allowed greater posting, rather than the inverse causal relationship? DealBreaker, for example, can afford to pay writers to post a lot because it has a high readership and the ad revenues that come as a result. Zero Hedge probably gets more contributors because it has a high profile. 2. to what extent does increasing posting lead to greater reader churn? C. Maoxian hit on something I have noticed with my own site — when I significantly increase my rate of posting I do see increased uniques, but also see a spike in unsubscribes from my rss feed.
Love to hear your thoughts on these topics.
Good job implementing your discovery.
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