Blogonomics: Good vs Popular Blog Entries

Now that Gawker Media's new pay scheme has been made public, Brian Lam of Gizmodo (a Gawker Media property) explains what the downside is, in practice, of paying for traffic. Gizmodo was one of the four blogs where the new scheme was tried out before being introduced company-wide, so he knows what he's talking about here:

Easy hits cause CPM deflation over time, making your real news posts, the core posts, worth less and less. It also rewards laziness, which I know have to slap down with an iron fist. So the funny random viral videos we loved posting so much before have become a serious problem with making sure pay is fair across the site. It forces you to be very careful, actually.

On the same entry, there's a bit of discussion about the distinction between good posts and popular posts. Paul Boutin agrees with me that it doesn't make sense to simply define the two as being the same: his most popular post of 2007 was a throwaway blog entry about the origins of the Google name.

Deal Journal has gone through the same exercise, and their top blog entry of the year was, like Boutin's, nothing particularly special. Sometimes it really is just blind luck which makes a post popular.

Nevertheless, looking at the top five Market Movers posts of 2007, there is some correlation between popularity, on the one hand, and [enter your criterion of quality here]. My #2 post was basically a copy-and-paste job from a reblog of a comment left elsewhere; the main thing I added was a little bit of HTML formatting. My #4 post I'm not very proud of, and in fact I posted a followup blog entry describing it as "long on the throwaway snark and a bit short on facts". But the #1 and #5 posts are both feature-length blog entries which took a fair amount of time to write and in which I try to explain quite complicated things with as much clarity as I can muster. In any event, here's the list:

1. Using the iPhone Abroad
2. Mark-to-Model on Wall Street: The Numbers
3. Ben Stein Watch: September 30, 2007
4. Poetic Justice in NetBank Implosion
5. Explaining CDOs, Overcollateralization Edition

Also heartening to me is that one of my personal favorites, the Ben Stein Watch of December 2, was in 6th place. But of course I simply don't go in much for the funny random viral videos, and nor do I write provocative things about Ron Paul. Maybe if I did, none of these blog entries would have made it into my top 5.