Peak flow: attracting readers by sending them away

Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I’ve spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don’t manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe’s law, which

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold ’em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday — some narcissistic publishers haven’t made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit’s utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply “publish” an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit [url=http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=36]traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky’s statement that “most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast”. Jarvis says “what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, ‘intercast’ communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community.” 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit’s equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe’s law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick’s 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That’s what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

Tags: Advice for Bloggers