What Gets Read Online?

Over the years I have argued that, contrary to the advice peddled on any number of sites, the real reason no one is reading your blog is because the ratio of blogs to potential blog readers is extremely high--far more people wanting to write for an audience than people wanting to be an audience for this sort of content (especially as online life becomes less and less verbal and more and more audiovisual, vloggers replacing bloggers, etc.). Indeed, where people of conventional and conformist mind will call that activity extremely "competitive" I would say that the sheer number of people jostling for attention (600 million blogs existing in the world according to one estimate), and the terms on which they do so (our reliance on search engines indexing very little of the Internet with search subordinate to ad dollars, the unwillingness of search engine users to venture far from the first "hit," etc., etc., ad nauseam), renders the idea of competition, in the sense of some functional market mechanism whereby consumers make judgments about the goods on offer and those who deliver the goods get ahead absolutely meaningless, any such sorting process completely collapsing under the pressure. This is made even worse by the fact that this is not a remotely level playing field--with those who can spend lots of money on site design and gaming the search engines and buying promotion plausibly having an edge, those who have connections with or can otherwise gain access to larger platforms and especially legacy media definitely having an edge, and so forth, all as search engines and other such means of discovery (apparently) "reward" those who have had clicks in the past with more visibility and more clicks, and vice-versa, so that those who start out obscure are likely to only become more so. The result is that many a writer seeking an audience online learns the hard way that no matter what they put out there no one will see it--while the sheerest drivel by someone with a claim, however dubious, to being a "somebody," will be lavished with attention and praises.

Still, even acknowledging that this is a game in which only an infinitesimal proportion of the players can win any prizes whatsoever, played on the most profoundly unfair terms from the outset with the odds getting much, much worse for those who fail to make a lot of headway early on, I will not deny that it seems to me that some kinds of content are indeed more likely to gain an audience than others; that, even if very, very few of the purveyors of that kind of material gain any audience at all, the point is that they are producing what people are taking, however little good it does them, while one is likely to find that those who do have an audience tend to offer their readers such fare.

I doubt I will surprise anyone if I say that people are more inclined to the entertaining as against the informative, the simple and quick as against the complex and involved, the emotive to the cerebral--and thus, of course, the narrative over the analytical, the personal to the impersonal. When they do go in for information the same principles apply--as they favor what promises to be immediately and readily useful in their own personal lives for solving a problem they care about (even if it is a false promise) rather than require any actual thought on their part, let alone any interest in the wider world.

Meanwhile, one gets further appealing to the audience that is actually there online than the population at large, of which the online audience may be less representative than most think. The talk of "digital divides" may seem passé in a world where even a decade ago more people had cell phones than toilets, and a significant majority of humanity is online, but it is one thing to have access to the Internet, another to spend lots and lots of time online using the Internet to do things besides access the most essential utilities or perform the most essential online tasks so that one has a chance of discovering things and taking an interest in them; of being active in comment threads, forums, social media; of registering their "likes" and sharing those things they find interesting with others. Consider, for example, the difference between the white collar worker who has a desktop at work--inside their own office--and is little supervised during the working day, and the service worker who has to hand their cell phone over to management when they clock in and only get it back when they clock out. Consider the difference between the web-connected individual with the full range of devices, with their handy keyboards if they want to do any prolonged typing in searching for information or engaging in dialogues, as against the person whose sole online access is through that cell phone they hand over when they come in to work--or maybe their local library. Between those extremes there lies a lot of difference in the quantity and quality of time spent online--and what appealing to those at one end of that spectrum will get you as against appealing to those at the other, online life still disproportionately dominated by the socioeconomically privileged, such that appealing to them pays off better than doing otherwise (a fact that has had important implications for our politics).

Will working in the way suggested here make you an online star? Very likely not. But to the very small extent that anyone can hope to reach an online audience their odds of succeeding with this course are probably a good deal better than the opposite.