The Secret to Blog Success?

So, what's the secret to having a successful (read: heaps of people reading it) blog?

Well-written? Engaging? Quirky? What exactly lures a devout and populous readership?

According to the British Psychological Society's "Quantity Not Quality Key to Online Popularity", it could simply be the sheer volume of posts:

Susan Jamison-Powell from Sheffield Hallam University presents the findings of a study of the activity of 75 participants in an online social community, and their popularity. The participants were recruited to a new community within popular social blogging site Livejournal.com, on which people post entries about their daily lives which are shared on the pages of others within their communities.

The researchers looked at a number of factors including: the number of blog posts each participant had made, the total word count of their blog posts, the tone of their posts - whether they contained negative or positive words - and the number of friends they had. Each member of the online community was asked to rate their impressions of each other member on a scale of one to five (one being very unattractive and five very attractive) after one week.

They discovered that the popularity of participants could be accounted for by their activity within the community, but not by the tone of their posts. "The more words a person had contributed, the more attractive they were rated by the other members of their community. The strongest factor was found to be the total number of words they had contributed over the week," said Susan Jamison-Powell. 

Her claims haven't gone without criticism, however. Take Chris' "New Study Suggest Blog Post Quantity Trumps Quality for Online Popularity", for instance. His post even earned a response from Susan Jamison-Powell, herself.

Nonetheless, if her study is on the mark, then it could certainly affect the way blogs and probably other media, are written in the future. I think we online folk respond to quantity because of the nature of online media, itself. Websites aren't generally great works of literature we treasure in our hearts, and re-read time and time again. We're largely invested in immediacy. Being up-to-date. And there's heaps of competition. A recent estimate claims there's as many as 70 million blogs out there.

Also, sheer quantity affords more of a hit-and-miss approach to quality. It's very much a production line process. Mass producing for the masses. As long as the overall product serves the "customer" decently enough, a few "flaws" here (read: writing quality) and there won't matter so much. In fact, the very art of spewing forth as much content as you can, would (ideally) improve your overall writing ability. Why else do writers advise hopefuls to "Write! Write! Write!"

Keep digging away at that hill, and you'll find gold eventually.