Monday, April 07, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Bloggers struggle to boost hits

The blogosphere widens daily, creating an ever-larger audience for anyone with a computer and an itch to write. Local blogger James Hudnall said visitor counts gratify him.

"When I first started blogging, I would get six hits a week, or a day, and I knew somebody among the visitors was my mom," said Hudnall, a comic book writer who often blogs on about geopolitics. "That was depressing. But now I get thousands of hits a day."

Some big-time bloggers, including University of Tennessee law professor Glen Reynolds (aka Instapundit) boasts daily visitor counts in the tens of thousands. But Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog," said most bloggers gather only small audiences.

"Typically the size of the average blog audience is in dozens or the hundreds," she said. "A few are in the thousands. If people are doing it for the audience, I'd tell them they'd be better off writing for a local newspaper, a community newspaper, a college newspaper. Those (publications) probably have bigger audiences than a blogger could accumulate in quite a long time."

People such as Reynolds, who appears frequently on CNBC, and former New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan are anomalies, Blood said. They've grown their blog audiences by flashing blog-page addresses on screen during television appearances.

"Andrew Sullivan already had a large media presence," Blood said. "But 99 percent of bloggers have no other media presence. Zero."

Bloggers who do attract moderately large audiences in the hundreds, Blood said, often are good storytellers or good aggregators, collecting links to articles people find interesting. But finding such blogs may get harder as the number of bloggers continues growing, she said.

"For every one weblog with something you like, you may find 1,000 with things you don't like," Blood said. "Although having so many voices is a good thing in and of itself, it makes it harder to distinguish individual voices from among the masses."

Finding specific blogs may get easier, Blood suggested, if search engine giant Google, which in February acquired Blogger parent Pyra, tries to index blogs by subject as it has indexed Web pages.

Meanwhile, Hudnall said people seem to find him, making blogging worthwhile.

"The writers I like are ones who've pushed all my buttons and got me to think or feel," he said. "I want to be able to do that to people; I want to make them think about things and feel things."