The involuntary redundancy of A list blog sites

Two interesting posts in the last day or so popped up in the Broadstuff Reader - Scott Karp arguing that much of the coverage of the Microsoft/Yahoo Hoo-Ha was just the same stuff cut and pasted over multiple blogs, and here a piece of analysis on which blogs make Techmeme showing a roughly 1/3rd each split between Top 10, Next 100, and The Rest of the Long Tail.

FYI the Top 10 are:

1 TechCrunch techcrunch.com
2 CNET News.com news.com
3 New York Times nytimes.com
4 ReadWriteWeb readwriteweb.com
5 Ars Technica arstechnica.com
6 Silicon Alley Insider alleyinsider.com
7 Between the Lines blogs.zdnet.com/BTL
8 VentureBeat venturebeat.com
9 The Register theregister.co.uk
10 GigaOM gigaom.com

Putting these two stories together, you get to the none too surprising hypothesis that most of the major blogs are just repeating the same old stuff, and thus a high degree of redundancy occurs. As Scott notes:

We all know how this happened, of course. All of the print publications, including non-niche pubs like the Washington Post, have to create a version of this story for their print publication, and then dump that story on the web. All of the web-native tech sites, competing tooth and nail for page views, are all obligated to publish at least one if not multiple takes on this story. Then there are all the sites that reproduced the wire version of the story.

If each site were, as in print, an island unto itself, this would make sense — if the news outlet did not cover the story then its readers might not know about it. But seen as a whole on the web, which connects each and every one of these websites, and especially seen through the lens of an aggregator like Google News or Techmeme, this huge mass of content about the same story doesn’t make much economic sense.

Indeed - you get economic nonsense - news redundancy - in fact (and fiction) which will, economically, inevitably lead to real life redundancies. This is a sort of tragedy of the commons - there is only so much attention out there, but the devil will bite the hindquarters of any blog that holds back and doesn't try and grab its share.

Inevitable result will be increasing filtering - if you read one top 10 (or maybe 2, El Reg is required reading in my view ) you pretty much have the main story in spades. The question then is what do blogs 11-100 do to keep up traffic given the main story is a done deal, and people will increasingly filter out repeats (Blogs 101 - 101 million will be picked up pretty much when they have something useful to add - we assume.). Finding 90 different angles on a story is non trivial......

Big picture - there are simply too many "A List" and "B List" blogs competing for attention with the same stuff to be sustainable, there has to be a shakeout. We assume it will be partly economic (how much money are the pro-bloggers actually making, can they do this sustainably?) and partly attention deficit as people filter some out and those wither on the newsvine. To survive, they will have to start differentiating themselves via, for example:

- adding value - eg TechCrunch CrunchBase
- getting there fastest with the mostest
- having unique insight from subject experts, or insiders etc
- having a unique approach that readers cleave to ( El Reg's sharp scepticism for example)
- personality based

One thing the blogs all face is the offset economics of the MSM - if they have to write it for the papers, they may as well pop it up on the blog at minimal on-cost, which coupled with their brands gives them quite an advantage, especially as many of the Big Blogs (in my opinion anyway) are no longer iconoclastic, individualistic views, but, by taking advertising and multiple journalists on board are increasingly looking like the thing they once so despised.

I think George Orwell once wrote a book on this dynamic