AltHouse, Citizen WElls, Economist’s View: These are some of the most popular blogs in the world and their streams of daily posts get hundreds of legitimate comments. They are published on Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad, respectively. A report published today by data analysis service Postrank concludes that legacy-hosted blog platforms are still far ahead of much-hyped microblogging services like Tumblr and Posterous in terms of reader engagement. This despite the fact that you don’t hear about people using Blogger and Typepad much anymore in early-adopter circles.
Read on for graphs of engagement below. The same analysis performed here can be run on any sets of top-level domains using the newly released Postrank Domain Activity API.
Which Blogging Platforms Get The Most Engagement?
Postrank measures engagement by comments to posts, mentions on Twitter, inbound links, votes on Digg and many other quantifiable metrics. All the numbers below are over the last 90 days. Blogspot, the domain for Google’s Blogger blogging tool, still reigns supreme almost 11 years after it launched.
What’s the takeaway here? I look at these numbers and think a couple of things. First, it appears that the world-changing democratization of publishing by the first wave of blogging tools has had some sticking power. Second, just because our early adopters’ scene and the mainstream media are talking about Facebook and Twitter instead of “the bloggers” nowadays, doesn’t mean that people have abandoned blogging. Finally, even though curation services like Tumblr and Posterous are pretty awesome, they haven’t gotten as much mainstream mindshare yet as the old classics have.
I think these engagement numbers are a good snapshot of the state of the technology over time. I find it encouraging that there is such a thriving blogging scene still today.
What do you take away from these numbers?
Postrank is generally very useful and accurate, but the maze of social media links can sometimes be challenging to penetrate. Running Facebook.com and Twitter.com through the API turns up an unrealistically low amount of engagement with those domains. Both are reported to be roughly 3 times as big as ReadWriteWeb. I suspect the ratio is a little bigger than that.
Other Interesting Observations
What other domains are being talked about across social media conversations? Postrank made some interesting observations today, including:
Twitter users talk about Google, Facebook users talk about Yahoo
Honda gets talked about far more than Ford or Toyota.
