Coffee, Sun & Technology

Bloglines users have access to a list of public subscribers for every blog they subscribe to. That’s what I’ve used to try to validate the theory I explained in my Bloggers’ Theory post. Just for fun.

If click on the “subscribers” link, you get a list of public subscribers for the blog and the date they first subscribed. That is a good sample of all feed subscribers - not perfect - but good enough to get broad trends on what’s going on with almost any blog. Let’s assume a strong correlation between total readers and public feed subscribers - and call this the “Reader Index”.

I took the five or six high-traffic, best blogs I read. TechCrunch (Mike Arrington), Let the good times roll (Guy Kawasaki), Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s CTO) , John Battelle, Venture Blog (mostly David Hornik) and Seth Godin. Then I used Excel Pivoting capabilities to build a cumulative chart of public Bloglines readers, to see if I could find the pattern I earlier posted about:

The data is fascinating. Let’s start with TechCrunch first.

This blog is not even a year’s old and counts over 20,000 feed readers. Now look at how smooth the seeding phase looks like - this blog started slowly, then things started to accelerate around August ‘05 and now you can see very nice growth, very steady. By the way this is one of the best blogs on Web 2.0, highly recommended.

John Battelle’s has a similar pattern. Now Seth Godin. His blog started late 2003. Did you notice the slow start - the explonential growth phase, and what now seems to be slower growth? Very interesting, maybe we all want Seth to write another book.

In an earlier post I was talking about how strong communities provide almost instantaneous readers for a well known and popular character - take the VC community and compare Venture Blog:

With Guy Kawasaki, who started a new blog earlier this year. Very fast initial growth, quickly reaching a saturation point, within days.

This is even more clear looking at Microsoft’s new CTO, Ray Ozzie, who started blogging in November ‘05.

Now benchmarking these blogs once against another (as of 1/29/2005):

(1) Guy Kawasaki
About: Famous entrepreneur, VC
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 878
Public profiles: 275 (31%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 12.2%
Time to get the 1st hundred public bloglines subscribers: 3 days

(2) Techcrunch
About: Web 2.0 reference site
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 3992
Public profiles: 1465 (37%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 3.9%
Time to 100 pub subs: 62 days

(3) Ray Ozzie
About: Ray is Microsoft’s new CTO
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 1063
Public profiles: 399 (38%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 2.2%
Time to 100 pub subs: 1 day

(4) Seth Godin
About: Seth is a viral marketing guru
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 3408
Public profiles: 888 (26%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 0.9%
Time to 100 pub subs: 287 days

(5) John Battelle
About: John covers the Yahoo/Google wars
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 4331
Public profiles: 1300 (30%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 1.2%
Time to 100 pub subs: 165 days

(6) Venture Blog
About: David is an influencial Web 2.0 VC
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 7904
Public profiles: 1466 (19%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 1.7%
Time to 100 pub subs: 233 days

Granted - data is far from perfect and there is a lot more than just looking at these numbers. But there are a few lessons to be learned from the pros. What do you think?

[Read related other posts on blogging analytical experiments: “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11 - and Blogging success: “what lessons have you learned”, A Blogger’s theory].

I’m committed to limiting my time investment in blogging (see rule #14), so let’s get to the point: looking at analytics data and correlating with market events, blog posts, other bloggers’ comments, etc - I’m seeing a pattern for readership growth.

The basic cycle goes like this:

(1) Seeding. You start a blog, write 8 or 10 interesting posts, and advertise your blog as much as possible (link on your email signature/forums/etc). Soon enough, another blogger will write about you or point to you (blogroll, etc).

(2) Exponential growth. After reaching some critical mass of readers, readership growth accelerates all of the sudden - typically because a popular blogger has written about you, or there is a press article pointing to your site.

(3) Organic growth. Your base keeps growing but it’s slooooowww. You’re incapable to sustaining the growth rates you had in phase 2.

The challenge then becomes to reach out to another community of readers, and starting this cycle again (or wave). For example, if the initial community was the “Web analytics gurus” - maybe your next community will be “Search Engine Marketing gurus”. In this case, you need to start the seeding cycle again.

In the context of this simple theory, it’s important to note that the characteristics of the communities you are targeting will determine how successful you’ll be. Community characteristics such as:
(a) Size: the “Search Engine Marketing” community is much larger than the “Web analytics” community
(b) Viral quality: the “Venture Capital” community is a lot more inter-connected than the “people with blue eyes” community
(c) Maturity: According to some studies, only 8-10% of Americans regularly read blogs. If there is no blogging culture in a given community, it’s going to be a lot harder to seed.

As far as this blog is concerned, I’ve seen 2 waves already: Web analytics gurus (started in ~Feb 2005), then the Google analytics followers (~November 2005). Now working on a new wave…

[Read related articles: “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11 - and Blogging success: “what lessons have you learned“].

I got an email from a loyal reader this week end asking me point blank what I had learned from my blogging experiments [Described in the “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11].

I’m a little embarassed to say that I don’t have a nicely packaged to-do list for you. For one, I haven’t achieved success and I am still doings TONS of experiments as some of you may have noticed (site layout, polls, etc).

But I did keep track of my ideas in a Notepad file (Ideas - not solutions). And since I don’t want to spend 29H13MINS writing this post (see #14) - here are the quick notes:

1 - Blog for a purpose (sell a product? ego? make money? something else) and stick to it
2 – Why should visitors read your blog (succint mission statement)
3 - Learn to recognize and ignore junk traffic (spent too much time slicing and dicing “junk” = people who landed here for Costa Rica Coffee, etc)
4 - Treasure your most valuable visitors (like Eric Butler@Webtrends, because they provide valuable feedback publicly or privately)
5 - Get people to return (because that’s your “base” = returning users)
6 - Get people to subscribe (because they return)
7 - Engage your audience through comments (because they return too)
8 - Have a “blogosphere presence” (commenting on other relevant blogs drives potential loyal subscribers)
9 - Leave quality posts on top of your blog (for increasing chances of getting people to return)
10 - Forget Adsense (waste of real estate, not worth the $15/mo)
11 - Don’t over-analyze (spent too many hours looking at Fireclick)
12 - RSS Readership is the only metric relevant to bloggers (because that’s your audience)
13 - Use Feedburner (they ROCK)
14 - Watch your time investment (writing stuff, making mods, looking at reports, etc)
15 - And… don’t be shy! (I’m free to blog, free to be right, free to be wrong)

Satisfied? Can we go home now? Not quite. I’m still trying to get my arms around other more general “blogging success” issues. Will post more soon. Tahhh.

I’m really interested in hearing what you think + this is a perfect opportunity for me to try a new service called dPolls. So here is goes:

Background. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has subpoenaed Google Inc. to turn over data including search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography. Google rejected the DOJ’s subpoena while other portals Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and America Online, Inc. have agreed to provide the requested data.

Eric Peterson quit Jupiter Research to join Visual Sciences. Eric explains his rationale here. Now guys, how did that happen? I mean, having the Forrester Analyst and the Jupiter Analyst both quit their jobs and join the same company (almost) the same week? Possible theories:

(a) Visual Sciences has “disruptive tech” (Then why didn’t it clearly outrank competing products in the Forrester and Jupiter industry reports?).
(b) Visual Sciences has the best team (Then why isn’t Matt Belkin working for them?)
(c) Visual Sciences has lots of money (Would that be why their product is soooo expensive?)

Enough cynicism guys. Visual Sciences is magic. I am mystified

Rumor: Bob Chatham leaving Forrester for Visual Sciences. As an reputed analyst, Bob has a unique understanding of e-commerce technologies and knows all the Web analytics vendors very well - this is a tremendous accomplishment for Visual and clearly validates that they have something going on. Congrats to both and best of luck.

In his Blackberry blog Aaron Johnson points us to an article on the New Yorker about the NTP/RIM lawsuit, with interesting points regarding the US patent system.

“…The BlackBerry will become the quintessential symbol of something else: a patent system that is out of control.”

I didn’t know much about NTP, but I find this paragraph illuminating:

Unfortunately, the real innovations in this case are not technological but legal. N.T.P. is a company without employees or products. It never tried to build a real business around its patents, and it never licensed them to others, until R.I.M. demonstrated just how lucrative wireless e-mail could be. No one alleges that R.I.M. used N.T.P.’s patents to build the BlackBerry; it invented its system from scratch. N.T.P., holding the patent on an idea and a crude design, waited until another company created a successful business based on similar ideas, and then headed to court.

Sounds familiar?

I thought I’d expand a little on the process of innovation, in connection with my post on patents. We all look for ideas to do better, at all levels – reaching a higher conversion rate, releasing a new killer feature for our software product, etc. I’ve learned a few lessons as an entrepreneur, and maybe this could be useful to the blog’s audience.

First and foremost, the most important thing for creating innovation is to eradicate any cynicism in your organization. When I was a student at Stanford, I took a Computer Architecture class – it was one of my first classes after I arrived from Europe. The professor started his class outlining some of the pre-requisites/etc, then made a point about most ideas being bad ideas. I still remember the PPT slide with the words on it “There are lots of ideas out there, most of them are bad”. Well, frankly if you know that you are going to get shot down and called stupid everytime you have an idea the most natural reaction is to not talk about ideas.

Second, and related, be mindful of your own reactions when people come share their ideas with you. Sharing an idea, particularly with the boss, etc, is an act of courage. I know for example that building on someone’s idea, whether the idea is eventually dismissed or validated in its original form is the most effective encouraging and rewarding message you can send.

Ideas take time to mature. I’ll give you one example: at Fireclick we quickly figured our customers needed help interpreting their analytical reports. One thing that was missing was some kind of benchmarking, where customer X could compare its conversion rates for instance to other customers in the same vertical. Originally we thought we could have a best practices group, or organize online Webinars to share some of these stats, or even formally introduce customers to each other so they could discuss. None of these worked, until we actually decided to create the Fireclick Index, a benchmarking service for online businesses. That was the answer, which took us 18 months to figure out (we released it in 2003).

Ideas [typically] don’t come from brainstorm, solutions do. That’s just observation, and I could be wrong – I’ve just noticed that brainstorms are good for finding solutions to a *specific* problem. In the early days at Fireclick, we institutionalized a 2H brainstorm every Thursday at 7AM, horrible time of the day for this kind of thing (the intent was to avoid any disruption). In hindsight, these meetings were good because they help set the right corporate environment for innovation, but most of them would typically end up on a frustrating note with no decisions made. By contrast, whenever we have big problem to solve and organize informal brainstorm meetings we find the solution and everyone feels good.

Customer ideas are typically higher quality. We all know this – but it’s so true. Maybe because customers actually point you to a problem you can creatively solve, which is easier.

Communication. This is where I personally struggle the most, partly because I’m a very impatient person and I never take the time to fully “package” my ideas before I share them. In smaller structures, we typically do not have the time to fully research ideas and find the right words to describe it. But it’s an essential step. Make your idea attractive and people will love to discuss it.

Last but not least, take action. It’s ok if you fail, because you’ll have learned something along the way and your next idea will be better. Personally, I’ve failed a lot, with some success along the way that makes it all worth it.

Last week we were awarded our third patent. These were early Fireclick patents (1999-2000) relating to web acceleration and predictive pre-download, they are a little special to me and my co-founders actually because they were the first patents we ever filed for Fireclick.

The patent process started in 1999 – during the bubble. We weren’t sure if our technology could really be patented, neither did we know if it was worth patenting. In all honesty we did it because “it had to be done” – spending the money at the time wasn’t too big of an issue for VC-backed startups. I remember our first meeting with the patent attorney, Steve Swernofsky, sometime in the summer of 1999. Stephane Kasriel (Fireclick’s co-founder) and I walked him through the main predictive caching ideas – at the time it was a little abstract because the technology had not been implemented yet. It was just a concept: using click-stream analysis to predict where users would go on a Web site and use a browser client (JavaScript typically) to pre-download content that was likely to be requested.

The meetings went well and we filed 3 or 4 patents on just predictive caching. Then over the years and as we morphed into a leading Web analytics company, we filed an additional 8-9 patents. At that point, the recession hit pretty hard and it was a little tough to justify new patent expenses. Patents do not typically have immediate returns and we really wondered why we spent so much time and money on IP, when the real urgency was to build a profitable company.

The jury is still out on the question of patents for start ups. Patents offer protection for startups but are seldom used for revenue generating purposes because the cost of enforcement is typically prohibitive for smaller entities. Also, they can be a distraction factor because these things do take time from the company brains.

Meanwhile, I think we did a fantastic job of bolstering our patent portfolio, with many more on the way. It’s always nice to get an email from your patent attorney saying “Good news, Patent 123 has been awarded!”. And it does a little something when you see companies like Google actually using some of “your” tech…