Longer Post Intervals = Less Readers?

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Longer Post Intervals = Less Readers?
Topic Started: Jan 3 2006, 07:15 PM (690 Views)
Zeerus	Jan 3 2006, 07:15 PM Post #1
Spank My Monkey! Posts: 1,596 Group: Admin Member #1 Joined: July 31, 2004	This has been on my plate for quite a while now. After reading Bryan's Feed Wars series, I decided to make my own little observations. Now, I visit hundreds of websites daily, and find that some blogs barely update once a month, and get tons of comments when they do, while other blogs update almost daily and get very few comments. So after pondering this for a few minutes I decided to start observing post intervals and readership loyalty. The sites I chose to observe were Avalonstar, Stopdesign, Mezzoblue, and Hack a day. In one case we have Mezzoblue and Stopdesign, two rarely updated blogs, and on the other side we have Avalonstar and Hack a Day, two blogs updated extremely often. Now, Mezzoblue and Stopdesign are both great websites that provide high quality content when they do update, and both maintain a very high fan base. On average each will receive around 30 to 50 comments per post, Stopdesign even having as many as 179 for one post. Mezzoblue can be the same. Comments on both sites usually come quickly, and will either stop or slow down after about a week or two. It seems to me that for both websites, the time between posts has little or no effect on readership loyalty. On the other side of the blogosphere we have Avalonstar and Hack a Day. Hack a Day updates daily while Avalonstar has almost daily updates. Both websites have some pretty good content on occasion (not to knock on either of you, but sometimes your content is nothing more then amusing or interesting for only a few minutes after viewing), and both get about 10 or 15 comments for each post. Now this is extremely random and what it comes down to, in my opinion, is the frequency of the posts. I believe that too many weblog posts will lead to lack of reader loyalty. Readers get tired of having to go to the website daily, and simply forget about it. But when there is a long expanse between posts the suspense grows, leading to more comments when the big update finally does come. So after about two weeks of observation I think it's safe to say that the time between posts does not greatly affect the number of readers a site has. I guess anybody could see this, but I wanted to get something solid down. Hopefully this will be helpful to some of you who are being pressured into posting more or less. It's all a matter of how good your content is, not how frequently it comes



+ Bird-E	Jan 3 2006, 07:31 PM Post #2
Dedicated member Posts: 420 Group: Elite Member Member #76 Joined: June 25, 2005	Very nice observations. Just one thing though, I actually like to see new postings daily. I come online daily and with new things to read, it keeps me occupied. There are some sites that I really like for the design and content, but they usually have longer post intervals. So after a week or so, it makes me feel like the site has been abandonned and so I dont check back as often as i'd like to.



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