Does Not Leaving Comments Matter?
by Tony Hung on November 24, 2008
Louis Gray spent a lot of time crafting a satirical post on the alleged “exchange rate” between comments and other means of interacting with a post — launched in part due to Allen Stern’s public bemoaning of a lack of comments thereof, and who is not alone in voicing there support for comments-on-blogs.
There are a lot of dimensions to this issue. I sympathize with Allen because not every blogger is doing this for the hobby and the egotistical pat on the back that traffic and comments bring (myself included) — some are trying to make a go out of it.
Traffic DOES matter when you’re trying to sell ads to support yourself or business.
But let’s rephrase the question another way — do a lack of comments mean that there’s a gap in reaching the maximum traffic potential?
As part of a larger discussion about the utility — or futility — of socially driven traffic, I’m not so sure. I love Allen (in a brotherly blogging kind of way), but when your bottom liine is governed by pageviews and uniques, I would argue that the level of user engagement is but a secondary metric. It is neither a necessary, nor sufficient, factor for success if your primary goal is traffic.
That is to say, I am of the opinion that in some (most?) industries, the percentage of active commenters are likely small with respect to the actual traffic coming in; and as a corollary, a lack thereof probably does NOT represent a giant gap with respect to maximizing traffic.
Furthermore, I think its possible that traffic that is commenting is probably the exact opposite of the kind of traffic bottom-line bloggers want — they actively visit your site, and as a function of familiarity with your blog, they probably develop ad-blindness the fastest.
Factor in the first-adopter-ishness of Allen’s blog, and you can probably double, triple, or square, if you like, the likelihood of ad-blindness (and therefore, lack of clickage, and therefore, a lower CTR all things being equal) on all display ads.
Call me a [whatever you like], but for folks who are interested in the bottom line, the best kind of traffic is probably search-related traffic where people have absolutely NO allegiance are morely likely to read, and then move on — and possibly click on an ad in trying to find what they’re looking for.
3 comments
Tony,
I write a blog that gets few comments, and one that gets tons of comments. What’s the difference? To be honest, I’m not sure but I do know that passion and emotion about a topic have a lot to do with whether people comment. And I would argue this is a bigger factor than whether is writing high-quality content.
by Mark Evans on November 24, 2008 at 4:07 pm. #
I totally agree.
So here’s a question: do you think that the site with a higher number of commenters have a higher clickthrough on ads? They may or may not be substantially increasing pageviews compared to other sources of traffic, but if they do and do have ad blindness, then they’re driving down CTR and, depending on how you sell your ads, make it harder to derive revenue from display ads.
If you care about paying the bills, then, maybe having lots of comments is immaterial, and perhaps, in some cases, counter-productive.
cheers
t @ dji
by Tony Hung on November 24, 2008 at 4:13 pm. #
The exchange rate wasn’t 100% satire. It was a real look at a real issue, with a fun twist. However, given your attention to it, and your authoring of a blog post with a link, you have earned 5 CN points.
As you know, I will try and engage wherever the discussion is. I don’t need to weigh the # of comments I get on my blog vs. FriendFeed, unless it’s a fun academic exercise, but I know dialog and exchange is a great way to reward and be part of the blog’s personality.
by Louis Gray on November 24, 2008 at 4:15 pm. #