As a blogger, I must admit I sometimes become envious of those bloggers who make 6-figure incomes for content, which in my opinion, is no better than any of the decent blogs which I read but earn much less.
Why do we see some blogs, like TechCrunch, rise to such heights whilst other blogs, which definitely had the same potential, fail to? TechCrunch started at roughly the same time as mine, and whilst I doubt my blog even compares to TechCrunch, I do find it amazing how they progressed to such heights.
When a blog becomes as big as TechCrunch, the blog’s content does not matter and its audience has changed. No longer does TechCrunch appeal to the average fan of technology, in fact it only appeals to the masses of start-ups who aspire to be covered by TechCrunch. Even I, a Web 2.0 blogger, unsubscribed from TechCrunch years ago, because they seemed to have lost any interesting insight or coverage of non-highly funded start-ups.
Smaller blogs are more authentic. Smaller blogs, whilst their English might be subpar, provide more genuine opinions and cover more genuine topics, whether that be gadgets, politics or websites. Larger blogs have a tendency to only report high profile topics, like Apple and Google releases. Bloggers like me, on the other hand, will happily blog about any start-up or product we feel to be interesting, whether their capital be £0 or £9,000,000.
How on Earth does TechCrunch maintain 1253K readers? Frequent, ‘high quality’ content? Perhaps. But most blogs can achieve that with resources. And that’s why TechCrunch succeed: money. If a blog, like TechCrunch, gets lucky within its first few months and secures advertising, it continues to grow and can begin to employ other bloggers. Then it keeps growing.
Blogging has a lot to do with skill, but in my opinion a lot more to do with luck. Had I not got dugg a few years ago, I doubt I would still be blogging. My post was not fantastic; I was just fortunate that someone stumbled across it and liked it.
(And, by the way, congratulations to Robin Wauters of Plugg for getting a job at TechCrunch. Despite my criticism, it is still quite an honour to be able to write for such a big blog!)
I agree with you. Some really meh blogs have huge followings. To some extent BoingBoing. Its sad because i know there are a lot of fantastic focused tiny blogs out there but I’ll never know about them.
I am just beginning to blog but I find that the “little guy” is definately very cool in the blog world.
Joe, I’d say that techcrunch is as popular as it is, simply due to it’s sheer number of posts. We’re talking 20+ per day most days. That’s google juice, and also builds reader loyalty. People also believe that just because a blog has a lot of readers its a great blog.
It’s very true that Techcrunch is very blah sometimes, but they are fast, and quick to post new posts on their topic of tech news and startups. I’ve beefed up my blogging a lot the past month.
From an average of 15-20 posts per month, to 51 posts just in the past 2 weeks.
My traffic shows for this – from about 3,000 total hits (100-200 uniques), to an average of 10,000+ hits and at least 1000 uniques.
Content is king. It also helps to try and work in a lot of google trends related articles – these bring tremendous amounts of traffic.
Yeah, techcrunch makes too much money and its changed because of it.. they only feature companies that are very well funded… i duno how techcrunch even became so big so fast…well I found this one new blog http://www.business2press.com, seems like a good web 2.0 blog…but ya tech crunch although its changed, its still pretty good…