Press Pass: Blogging by the Numbers
5/7/2009 6:38 PM | 10 Comments | Page 2 of 4
While the 1UP News section doesn't end up looking so good as far as original content (the only news post that could be considered "original" was a promo for
1UP's Game Night), comparing it directly to the blogs is not quite fair. 1UP posts plenty of original content (previews, reviews, interviews, features, etc.) that does not show up in the news feed. Still, the news section itself seems stereotypically blog-like in its reliance on official press releases and links to other sources for its content. I'm not trying to pick on 1UP News here; the same could be said for many other non-blog "news" sections on other sites. A few exceptions -- such as Gamasutra, VG247, Siliconera, Shacknews, and Edge -- tend to include more original content, and, not coincidentally, end up getting links from a lot of blogs in the process. Future studies may look into these sites in more detail.
Figure 2 (Click to expand)
Of course, the blogs got a bit of help in their original content this week. With E3 coming up, Gamers' Day Events from the likes of Capcom, Namco/Bandai and Sony provided plenty of fodder for previews. A full 38 percent of the original content on the "big three" blogs for the week were previews and/or impressions of games from these events (see Fig. 2). But the blogs' original content was much deeper than that. Joystiq had a
video tour and
interview focusing on the historic Funspot arcade, for example. Kotaku featured a
video interview with Dead Rising 2 producer Keiji Inafune alongside a thoughtful editorial on
the future of art games. Destructoid featured a wide range of
reviews for both
classic and current games, as well as
"musings" columns culled from its numerous user blogs. Each blog had podcasts, contests, community outreach and plenty of other content that's hard to deride as simply being transcribed from somewhere else.
Not just that, but the blogs managed to break some news as well. Joystiq
broke the release date for the long-anticipated (but as of Joystiq's posting not-yet-confirmed) arrival of
Peggle on the iPhone. Kotaku found new information about
wearable Achievements for Xbox Live Avatars through a tipster-submitted survey. Heck, even Destructoid found
a great deal on The Eye of Judgment at Wal-Mart for its readers. These might not be groundbreaking investigative reports on the scale of Watergate, but they show how blogs are adding to the information stream, not just taking from it.
What kind of stuff are they writing about?
Figure 3 (Click to expand)
On to the second major criticism of blogs -- that they pad their post counts with screenshots and rumors and cultural fluff that's not
real news. Even disregarding the blogs' original content (which, as discussed above, is often real news by any definition), my survey showed that blogs cover plenty of topics besides
cakes that look like game systems.
Unsurprisingly, nearly 40 percent of the blog posts I saw discussed specific information about a game or games: release dates, newly revealed gameplay details, information about downloadable content and so on. If this shouldn't be the bread-and-butter of any gaming news site, I don't know what should. (Indeed, these game-related posts made up 54 percent of 1UP's news section for the week.) On top of that, another 30 percent of blog posts dealt with the industry itself -- the kind of behind-the-scenes news you'd see in the business section of the newspaper. These categories heavily outweighed the 20 percent of posts that were simply devoted to screenshots or trailers and another 20 percent that dealt with cultural ephemera (like cakes). Another 10 percent dealt with consumer news -- deals, product announcements, etc. [Editor's note: Percentages don't add up to 100 because one post can fit into many categories.]
