gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

why do you blog?

Anil makes a great point about the limitations of "popularity" to measure how successful your blog is.

So when I see disparaging of "unpopular" or low-flow weblogs or the use of someone's readership as a barometer of their legitimacy, credibility or importance, and I have to strongly object. Popularity is easy. What matters is that you connect.

No surprises there. I'm in the business of getting people to hand over 5, 6, 7-figure checks, either to me or the people I work for. It's a different process altogether than mass-media campaigns, the majority of which deal in 1 or 2-figure numbers.

I've told this story before: My father went to Harvard Business School in the 70s. One of his professors, an eminent scholar, had studied the question of what was harder in business: to get one person to give you a million dollars, or to get a million people to give you one dollar.

The prof insisted getting one person to fork over a million was statistically easier by a very wide margin. Again, no surprises there.

Bloggers who get hung up over audience size are still thinking in mass-media terms. Big mistake. Very big.

Posted by hugh macleod at April 17, 2004 4:53 PM | TrackBack