Watching blogs succeed and fail...

This post comes as a reaction to the fact that I have not, in fact, returned to my weekly posting schedule unlike what I said earlier this month. There has been no resumption of regular updates, no deluge of intellectually stimulating posts, no return to the "routine." In fact, as I speak, I am as far out of "routine" as I can possibly get. Life seems to be like that boat in The Perfect Storm, that gets tossed around a lot and flips all over the place. Fortunately it appears that my blog hasn't lost all of its readership in this period of inconsistency.

I always promised myself that I wouldn't be one of "those people," who doesn't adhere to a regular update schedule when I explicitly state, in my header no less, that the blog will be updated by such and such a day, every week. This is a particular pet peeve of mine with webcomics, and while this is far from a webcomic, I still believe that adhering to schedules is important. People like reliability, and I'm obviously not providing.

A similar thing happened with AnimeLife, Scott's anime blog. He went on hiatus for well over a month, in which time I kept checking back and checking back, but nothing ever came up. Not even a single post, detailing why the long away time. When he finally did return, the blog took on a new form - not focusing on episode recaps or summaries...but something different. It began to cater to Scott, and anime bloggers within the community at large.

There are several different measures of a blog's success. The most obvious is the number of "hits" a site gets (of which I get a decidedly mediocre amount). More popular blogs, like Riuva and Memento, can get thousands upon thousands of visitors a month. Of more interest to the blogger than hits, however, is the number of comments he/she will get on a post he/she writes. This is because comments are not only a method for interaction with the people who read the blog, but also serve as an indicator of how many people have invested themselves in reading it. Again, for the more popular blogs you'll see well over a dozen comments on even the most mundane topics. Now, for a blog of mediocre popularity like mine, you can expect maybe a half dozen comments on a good post, and a handful for something of no importance.

So what determines a blog's success? Being good at what you do, for one. TJ Han over at Riuva is great at figure reviews and is deep into that niche of otaku culture, while bateszi at...Bateszi does some really great episode/series reviews. Then there's the amount of content you put out. For example, Garten over at Memento does more episode summaries in a week than I post in a month (or two). Do pictures and the "flash" really attract readership? I think it depends on what you're talking about, and who you're trying to get to read your blog. Some of the best blogs I've read have no pictures at all, but then on the same token, many of the most popular blogs actively incorporate media into their posts. It really depends on the post type (for example, editorial-like posts don't require loads of pictures whereas episode summaries and reviews tend to be more fully loaded).

Another aspect of the anime blogging that cannot be ruled out is the number of bloggers who cross-reference your blog (either by citing you, linking you, or commenting on your blog). It's a small community, as evidenced by anime-nano and other anime blog rolls, and knowing other people definitely helps get the word out there, especially for the blogs with smaller reader bases.

Overall, what does this all mean? Nothing really. Blogs succeed and fail, in the end, based on the wills of their creators to continue to write for them. Many more factors than what I listed above contribute to that, but I think I'll save that for a future post.

Note: Been watching Welcome to the NHK!, and I love it. It's the best show I've seen this year, combining a good dose of otaku-oriented humor and a very creepy sense of reality. And it's fun to watch, something that always helps. Its musical score is unusually good, and the opening theme in particular sticks out for its cheerful score. I recommend this series highly.