Divergent Poles decided (about 2 weeks ago) that he will no longer post entertainment topics on his blog and has been a bit disappointed that political blogs have fallen off the Top 10 in PinoyTopBlogs.
As os today, only the Sassy Lawyer’s Houseonahill.net remains on the Top10 for political blogs. Jove, Max Limpag, PCIJ, and Manolo’s blogs slipped off the rankings in the last couple of weeks.
This tells me what Filipinos would rather read about in the blogosphere; Encantadia, Pinoy Big Brother, Ang Panday, etc. are on top of the list and one’s rights to express oneself freely in the web is a distant second. I have seen folks fight harder over which channel is better (GMA vs. ABS-CBN) than this issue seeing that there are scant comments regarding this issue. Now this is sad. I will stop here, before I say something I regret.
Allow me to dig up some reasons why, less on the social perspective and more on the technical why this trend is happening.
- A huge portion of a Political blog’s traffic comes from regular readers. Repeat readership is not a significant factor in the rankings.
- A big majority of a showbiz blog’s traffic comes from search engines. It reach up to 80% for most of the newer showbiz blogs. These is one of the difinitive factors affecting blog stats.
- Keyword popularity. There will always be more searches for “Cassandra Ponti” than “Gloria Arroyo”.
- Age group of internet users. Political blogs only attracts internet users somewhere between the age of 21 to 60. Showbiz blogs can attract internet users as young as 12 and as old as 80.
- Traditional media influences. There will always be more showbiz shows than political/current affairs on TV.
Hence, in terms of market reach and mass appeal, showbiz rules. (This may be true with other countries as well.)
Yup!
This is heavily affected by how the evotopsites software ranks popularity. Using currently ignored factors may indicate that these type of blogs even out. Maybe.
Marc suggestion that this may seasonal is also valid. As we may approach Christmas, we notice that entertainment spending increases, as well as the competition between the big networks. Increased activity and spending also leads to increased interest, thus a seasonal spike for entertainment-related blogs. :)
Abe, is it a substantial decrease? Baka seasonal lang? I still think what we’re seeing is just a traffic increase for the showbiz blogs and not necessarily a decrease in site traffic for political blogs.
I mean you know how “different” from each other commenters from showbiz and politcal blogs are hehe :)
yugz,
see my entry about this topic.
yugs.
see my entry about this topic.
As the blogosphere expands, it will attract Filipinos of varying content preferences. What PinoyTopBlogs can explore later on is the creation of categories where blogs can be ranked accordingly. This would meant having two buttons, one for overall, the other per category. Although this would require work determining which category does a blog belong too.
However, this way, all blogs wont be ranked from just overall traffic but more on their readership, based on the category they belong to. As Dr. Ned Roberto would say in one of his books, “segment, segment, segment.”
@ The Ca t
Ahh yes, found about that too. However, I have asked some of the “networked blogs” to only use one tracking button per blog. And you are right about the political issues/scandals being a huge boost factor.
@ Marc
Yes, some of them have.
I’m curious if the the political blogs mentioned actually experienced a dip in traffic..it would be hard to imagine that the people who religiously read political blogs suddenly wake up one day and go gaga over teleseryes :)
Oh btw, I failed to mention that some weblogs about showbiz that made it to top twenty were not personal weblogs. They are in fact, network blogs masquerading as personal. You can imagine having episode by episode presented in the blog.
I visited each and every one of them when I did my research.
Yuga,
The falling off the Top Ten of the political blogs
is due to the lack controversial issues these days.
Not so controversial to merit the attention
of the people. Kung baga sa marketing, fashion fashion lang yan.
At the height of GMA’s crisis, political blogs ruled.
Sassy was already popular then. MLQ3 is already MLQ and PCIJ has already made a mark in the media during Erap’s time.
Not all political blogs made it to the top 20. Only those who were pro-opposition and were linked by the biggies. Someone claimed that there were no pro-government blogs but there were; they were not just popular.
I had an experiment myself about this showbiz blog.
I did not advertise it in the pinoyblog, did not promote it in my blog. I merely relied on the keywords for the hits. It is a blogspot account.
It’s about teleserye. It did not pick up.
I opened another website, it is entitled pinoy songs at ibp. to find out if songs and lyrics really appeal to people. But my main purpose for the blog is to collect anything about pinoy.
It’s traffic come from searches about folk songs, traditional songs which I believe come mostly from students both from the US and Philippines. Still, I have to link it to my main weblog.
Funny, when I google, it is still NWC ranked in the search.
I used to be number 3 in the humor of blogtopsites but when some blogs used nude pix
in their sites, I was pushed down, barely managing it to top ten. Those who made it to the top ten are not pinoybloggers.
But I cannot compromise my blogging philosophy(pilosopo ako di ba)since most of my
visitors come from educational institutions. Yeah baby, my researches and some articles are
featured in some schools’ website.
No swearing, no erotic blogs and no nude pix.
I once posted a pic of nude woman, and my traffic that day was considerably reduced.
The popularity of a blog is a mixture of several factors: topics, advertisement and promotions,
presentation and networking.
“been a bit disappointed that political blogs have fallen off the Top 10 in PinoyTopBlogs.”
shouldn’t blogging about our interests and what we think is important weigh more than blog rankings?
I say, divergent poles should continue doing what he is doing and keep the number of readers he has (no matter how inferior compared to showbiz blogs it is in site visits).
And yes, it is indeed very SAD that mroe people would rather read fluff.