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Web Strategy Analysis (Part 2/2): Homepage Breakdown of Tech-related Personal blogs in Technorati 100

Categories: User Experience, Web Advertising, Web Marketing, Web StrategyPosted on July 22nd, 2007

You must read this first to understand this post: Yesterday, in my previous analysis, I did some homepage breakdowns for the top 10 blogs in Technorati. In the comments, I was asked to make a conclusion or a suggestion to what I found. I looked at the top personal blogs in the 100 rank and found far less advertising.

Criteria
The following blogs meet these requirements:

Personal Blogs (written by one person)

Focus on Technology (it would be too much work to do all personal blogs)

In the Technorati Top 100

Methodology
Same as yesterday, I took screenshots and put overlays for five categories: identity, navigation, search, content, and advertising.

[Finding: The Top 10 Blogs in Technorati resemble online eMagazines, and have more homepage advertising than the tech related single authored blogs in the Top 100]

Findings, Conclusions, and Analysis:

Tech related personal blogs in the Technorati 100 have far less advertising than the top 100 blogs by average, compare the “red zones”.

All of the top 10 related blogs are written by groups, some resemble online magazines more than a personal blog.

It’s being debated in my comments if having advertising reduced the credibility of a blog

17) Guy Kawasaki
How to Change the World Entrepreneurship, marketing, venture capital, & evangelism
Authority: 8,760

33) Robert Scoble
Scobleizer
Authority: 6,681

54) Jason Kottke
kottke.org : home of fine hypertext products
Authority: 5,219

65) Joel Spolsky
Joel on Software
Authority: 4,808

73) Steve Rubel
Steve explores how technology is transforming marketing, media and public relations.
Authority: 4,508

95) Hugh MacLeod
gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”
Authority: 3,710

Please view Part 1: Top 10 blogs for comparison. Let me know what you think. It made techmeme.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under User Experience, Web Advertising, Web Marketing, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Simon B.

guy kawasaki x y
total 500 317
purple 171 31
purple 54 36
red 70 120
blue 63 50
yellow 61 39
green 177 254
Totals: green 28%, whitespace 62%, purple 5%, red 5%, blue 2%, yellow 2%.

kottke x y
total 500 317
purple 104 13
red 119 78
blue 82 11
blue 118 80
blue 123 117
green 160 287
Totals: green 29%, whitespace 50%, purple 1%, red 6%, blue 16%, yellow 0%.

micro persuation x y
total 500 317
purple 186 27
purple 67 106
red
blue 65 112
yellow 68 41
green 265 264
Totals: green 44%, whitespace 45%, purple 8%, red 0%, blue 5%, yellow 2%.

Content to whitespace ratio: guy kawasaki 74%, kottke 57%, micro persuation 80%. In general it seems the top 10 spend more of the visuals on non-content, than the less popular ones. Also looking at online newspapers, they tend to have the content in tiny content areas and lots of less interesting stuff around. (Does perhaps the distribution of content to whitespace ratio follow the distribution of website popularity?)

jeremiah_owyang

Yup Star, it's using Technorati's authority ranking

Star Aasved

The criteria listed seems a bit sketchy - is most popular also part of the decision-making process in terms of determining the top ten? Is that the "authority" number?

jeremiah_owyang

@ Nik

You are so right. I would call that "Marketing" not advertising. They are weaving their influence into their stories. That's cluetrain.

@ Alan, those are the very questions I asked, but cannnot answer without more research

alan p

Be interesting to know if having photos on the Identity part is a good or a bad thing :)

Adevertising probably increases the impression of being a "big swinging blog" - as otherwise it would not attract Ads - but will inevitably raise questions about objectivity.

Nik Cubrilovic

All of these sites, while they may not advertise through a banner of online ad, are still advertising something (themselves, their companies, their products)

jeremiah_owyang

Geoff, glad it was helpful.

Geoff Livingston

This is fascinating. It almost seems that advertising legitimizes the very top properties. It would be interesting if one of the mid-100 bloggers strategically targeted the top ten via additional corporate sponsorship of their blog. Great stuff!