Press Pass: Blogging by the Numbers
5/7/2009 6:38 PM | 10 Comments | Page 4 of 4
Figure 6 (Click to expand)
As for the accusation that any one blog just takes its posting ideas from another, this is easily disproven just by looking at the timestamps for each overlapping story. As you can see in the chart above, no one site has a monopoly on getting the stories up first. When Kotaku and Joystiq overlapped on a story, Kotaku's post preceded Joystiq's nearly 55 percent of the time and Joystiq's preceded Kotaku's more than 45 percent of the time. To say that either site is
just copying from the other based on this breakdown is ludicrous (and remember, this doesn't include all the original content and stories where the sites
don't overlap). While the outlets I looked at probably took posting ideas from each other, no one of them can claim to be the primary source for the others.
I'm not trying to absolve gaming blogs of all their sins. They're often too glibly snarky, too poorly sourced and too focused on quantity over quality of posts. But I hope this little study has proven that they're not the leeches they're often made out to be. In fact, the largest gaming blogs are starting to resemble full-service gaming sites in their scope and depth.
