Stap isi

3 January 2010

Baboons! Baby-snatchers! Bashi-bazouks!

The raw number of comments on a blog or forum isn’t necessarily an indicator of its success or failure. But it’s one of those metrics that carry a lot of weight. Compared to pageviews, they often look disappointing! What’s good?

The Sydney Morning Herald is a high volume site. Last week, according to Hitwise, it was the 17th most visited in Australia.

Matt Crozier of Bang The Table blogged about the number of comments it had received on its most discussed stories in 2009:

1. Roads are for cars, not Lycra louts – 478 comments
2. Internet censorship plan gets the green light – 459 comments
3. Your call is important to us – 435 comments
4. Cyclists do not have the same rights as motorists on roads – 412 comments
5. Hated without cause: faith’s high price – 363 comments
6. A plague of atheists has descended, and Catholics are the target – 331 comments
7. Science cooks the books, driving sensible people to screaming point – 316 comments
8. Sharia in Australia: sanity or shocking? – 308 comments
9. God is good, but just be sure not to take Him too literally – 293 comments
10. Cyber attacks smite atheist websites – 287 comments

Crozier compares the ratio of comments to visits with Bang The Table’s busiest consultations – “way less visitors than the newspapers and way more comments” – and suggests that people are more likely to participate if the decision makers are present. Score one for community engagement.

“If we think someone who has influence is listening to what we have to say then many more people will participate by commenting or voting.”

The SMH also attracts a very broad audience – with an accompanying shallowness when it comes to local or niche issues.

This story about a Sydney council attracted 76 comments – a significant number. But how would you rate the usefulness of the comments if they were part of your council’s planning or consultation process?

Compare with this discussion taking place amongst a much smaller group. There’s a good number of comments, perhaps more than would be posted on a council web space, and with a high ratio of quality to quantity.

Seems to me that:

1. no matter the raw number, we should value constructive comments highly because they are clearly difficult to elicit (whether online or in person); and
2. in some circumstances there will be more value in working with one or more existing communities than building our own sites.

— b3rn   comments, web metrics   Jan 3, 12:01 PM   #

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