Does Size Always Matter ... In Blogging, I Mean

The Press Gazette has published a league table of the number of unique visitors for the biggest mainstream media news sites for January 2008.

BBC News 9.77 million
The Sun 4.54m
Guardian.co.uk 4.49m
Telegraph.co.uk 2.66m
The Times 2.65m
Mail 2.59m
New York Times 1.74m
Sky News 1.61m
CNN 1.44m
Independent 1.08m
Mirror 1.08m
Financial Times 0.86m
Manchester Evening News 0.54m*

When you consider that the top three most popular political blogs (Guido, ConHome and yours truly) get between 0.25 and 0.35m unique visitors a month, you have to say that's not bad considering we're all more or less one man bands, compared with the journalistic and marketing resources all the above organisations have at their disposal.

Frankly, the only way individual blogs will ever really compete for traffic with the MSM is to ally themselves with one of the MSM sites. But if they did that they would lose their unique identity, I suspect. The difference between here and the US is that the big US blogs tend to be group based blogs rather than individual ones. Some are even attracting venture capital. I can't see that happening here as the only really successful group blogs have been started by MSM organisations.

Strnagely, I do not see blogs as competing with anyone. Some may compete with each other, I suppose, but it is facile to suggest that an individual like me or Guido can truly compete with a blog run by a major corporation. But what does 'compete' actually mean? Does it purely mean blog traffic, or does it mean quantity and quality of writing? I may get higher traffic than the Spectator Coffee House but I cannot compete with them for frequency of posting or indeed quality of writing. And in the end, that means their traffic levels will, one day, overtake mine, I suspect.

In the end, what makes a blog succeed is its uniqueness. Is it doing something that no one else is? Is it filling a niche? Does it have a 'personality'? Look at all the most successful blogs and those are the criteria they meet - Guido, ConHome, Dizzy, PoliticalBetting, John Redwood, - the list goes on. Perhaps this is the reason why so few blogs on the left have 'made it' outside their own milieu - because they have failed in the uniqueness and personality test. Those that do meet it still fail to attract a mass audience. I'd put Hopi Sen, Dave's Part, Quaequam, Cicero's Songs, Bob Piper and NorfolkBlogger in this category, but I doubt whether any of them get a four figure unique visitor count each day. Does it matter? Not really in the short term, because a good blog is a good blog, no matter what level of readership it has. But in the long term people start asking themselves why they are bothering if few people are bothering to read what they have to say. They shouldn't. Most politicians would give their eye teeth to give a speech to an audience of two hundred. So if you are a candidate with a blog whose readership amounts to only a few hundred, that's the fact you should comfort yourself with! It really is a truism in blogging to say that it isn't always size that matters.