Optimal frequency of blog posts
Blog readers don’t pay money to read blogs, but they do pay with their time. Like many people I guess, I subscribe to about 30 or 40 blogs, and I obviously don’t have time every day to read all the posts that these blogs generate. I skim through the headlines and read the posts that look interesting to me. This is fine, but some blogs try to impose too much cost on me by posting too often. Prime offenders among the blogs I read are Mashable! and PaidContent, which each pump out around 20-30 posts every day. Out of those 20 or 30 posts, I might want to read 2 or 3. However it’s still going to take me a decent amount of time to filter through all the headlines to find the ones I want. Inevitably, it becomes too tedious and I end up not reading these feeds at all, which probably makes both me and the blog authors worse off.
I think there’s a basic lesson for blog economics here. People pay with their time to read a blog and to filter the posts that they are interested in. Posting too much sets this “price” too high, and will drive readers away. On the other hand, posting frequently on more topics might capture a wider audience because you’re more likely to appeal to people’s specific tastes. There’s definitely a tradeoff, which means there’s an optimal frequency of posting. I’m not sure what it is, but gut feeling says it’s probably under 10.
6 Comments
The fewer posts published, the better.
The author can focus on fine-tuning each individual post and creating something beautiful and unique rather than becoming an echo chamber like so many blogs inevitably become.
I agree with you and limit my blog to 2-3 posts per day. Never more than four.
@ Chris: How about one post a month, whether it needs it or not? Is that better than one every Saturday (needs it or not)?
@ Aaron: What’s the rank order correlation coefficient between popularity and activity in your survey? Is there a 2nd or 3rd order equation that fits the data and suggests an optimal number of posts per month?
Chris: I don’t think fewer = always better. That would mean that zero posts is best. The optimal number must be greater than zero.
Bill: It’s 0.26. But the response scale for popularity (readers per month) was not linear, so the correlation is a bit hard to interpret I think.
Aaron, that’s why I asked about higher-order equations. Not all regressions have to be linear.
If you’re posting more than one two two posts a day, you’re really running more than one blog, and you should probably split them out. At least offer distinct feeds. It’s extremely hard to have enough quality content on a particular topic to be worth 20~30 posts a day on a given topic: I’ve never seen value at that point, and I end up just unsubscribing for exactly the reasons you lay out.