Press Pass: Blogging by the Numbers
5/7/2009 6:38 PM | 10 Comments | Page 1 of 4
Kyle Orland
Status: "You can't get quality video game editorial from a value menu!" "No, really, you can't."
When I talk about the subject of blogs (and videogame blogs in particular) with fellow journalists, PR people, developers and readers, I keep hearing the same few complaints:
- Blogs just publish press releases and stuff from other outlets. They don't do any original writing.
- Blogs just post fluff like screenshots and rumors and pictures of cakes. They don't publish real news.
- All the blogs just steal stuff from each other (and the partisan corollary, [Blog A] just steals everything from [Blog B]).
While these arguments may apply to some blogs (and have perhaps fit all of blogging at one point), they didn't really apply to my experience writing for Joystiq from 2006 through 2008. Sure, a lot of our day was spent summarizing and linking to the work of other people, and we posted our fair share of screenshot galleries and picture of cakes. But we also did a lot of original reporting, and wrote consumer-focused reviews, previews and other features that tended to get lost amidst the never-ending drumbeat of news posts.
Of course, I could make this firsthand argument to anyone who cared to listen, but I never had any hard data to back up my claims. Until today.
For a full week (April 27 to May 3), I read and cataloged the posts of three of the largest gaming blogs out there: Joystiq, Kotaku and Destructoid. For comparison's sake, I also included Wired's Game|Life (a much smaller blog attached to a major media outlet) and the News section of 1UP.com (a prime example of a major "non-blog" gaming news section, although, as you'll see, it's not that different in practice from a blog). The end result was a data set detailing the contents of nearly 900 distinct posts* covering over 550 different stories.** What did it show? Keep reading to find out.
* For simplicity, I compared only content that showed up on the front page of each site. This disregards content from subsites like Kotaku AU, Joystiq's console-specific sections and Destructoid's community blogs.
** For the purposes of this analysis, an overlapping "story" is the same basic information posted in two different places -- two blogs linking to the same Gamasutra interview, or discussing the same press release, or posting the same trailer, for instance.
Where do the posts come from?
Figure 1.1 (Click to expand)
Figure 1.2 (Click to expand)
The first major gripe to address: Blogs only post press releases and links to other outlets. While that's certainly largely true, it's hardly
exclusively true these days. In the week's worth of blog posts I looked at,
a full 21 percent of the blog posts were "original," meaning they included substantial original reporting or editorial writing by the blogger. Granted, this figure pales in comparison to the roughly 41 percent of blog posts that come from "official" sources (directly or indirectly from a company press release or statement) and the 34 percent from "linked" sources (links to content created or originally unearthed by another outlet), but it's hardly nothing. In fact, it lines up nicely with a 2008 study that found
80 percent of quality UK newspaper content came from newswire or PR sources. On average, the "big three" blogs I looked at (Joystiq, Kotaku and Destructoid) published
over 57 "original" posts each in a single week. To say that these bloggers
only take content from other sources is obviously unfair.
