Are blog comments important?
How do you measure the success of a blog? There are many different metrics, including the number of unique visitors, the number of pages viewed or the number of external links to a particular blog. But some bloggers claim to be successful because they attract a large number of comments. Is this a good measure? Are comments really meaningful? And are they visible? A recent study from the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam and Nielsen BuzzMetrics gives us some insights on this phenomenon. One of the conclusions of this report is clear: comments are not explored even if they represent 30% of the contents of a blog on average. Therefore, it can be argued that they’re almost useless and that their number doesn’t count — except for the blog owner and the commentators themselves. But read more…
The full survey is available online as a PDF document, “An Analysis of Weblog Comments” (8 pages, 260 KB. And you’ll find some essential numbers below. Of course, you can disagree with the method used by the two researchers, Gilad Mishne and Natalie Glance. Nevertheless, they looked at about 36,000 blogs picked from the Blogpulse index, which is large enough to draw some valid conclusions.
Below is a table showing some of the key numbers of the survey (Credit: report mentioned above).
What are the essential conclusions of this report?
- Comments constitute a substantial part of the blogosphere, accounting for up to 30% of the volume of weblog posts themselves.
- On average, comments are shorter than weblog posts (in terms of text length); we estimate that the textual size of the “commentsphere” is 10% to 20% of the size of the blogosphere.
- [Comments are invisible:] Less than 2% of comment content is currently available in syndicated form.
- A large number of comments is consistent with the influence level a weblog or post has.
- Clearly, commented weblogs are substantially more read and linked to. However, there is a chicken-and-egg situation here: assuming a fixed percentage of weblog readers post comments, weblogs which have more incoming links and more readers are more likely to have higher amounts of comments.
- Finally, we offer a novel way to determine the level of controversy caused by a weblog post by analyzing the type of comments written in response.
After reading the whole survey — or my selected excerpts — a question remains: are comments a good indicator of the success of a blog? As they remain invisible for the most part — you have to visit a blog and voluntarily click the “Comments” link of a post to read them — it seems that comments are only important to the blog owner and to the commentators themselves.
So what do you think? Do you read the comments addressed to you? Do you count them? Are you proud when one of your note attracts a dozen comments? Please post your thoughts.
Sources: Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, April 10, 2006
