Yale study : Blogs build an audience by outgoing links and promoting rivals
Blogs build an audience by promoting rivals and outgoing links finds a Yale School of Management study.
The study was performed by the Yale Center for Customer Insights and authored by Dina Mayzlin, an assistant professor of marketing at Yale and Hema Yoganarasimhan, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale.
Findings of the study include:
- Posting a one-way link to a potential competitor may seem risky strategy since it may lose readers to the linked blog. However, that linking can build an audience because it signals to readers that the blog is skilled at locating useful information, making it more likely that the reader will visit again.
- From the consumer's perspective, linking increases the attractiveness of the blogosphere since links enable readers to locate information.
- There are two dimensions of blogs. One the ability to break the news and two, the ability to find news in other blogs.
- The incentive to link is maximized in a time period when the blogger is not able to generate news-breaking content on her own.
- Impressing readers is a big issue for bloggers. If a blogger is not able to 'get the scoop,' it is in her best interest to direct readers to a rival that has new information.
- A byproduct of this incentive to link is a self- sustaining system of quality monitoring between different blogs. Blogs that more reliably produce information are more likely to have more incoming links and hence receive more visitors.
- Though advertisers typically place a lot of value on blogs that produce original content and have a high number of incoming links, the number of outgoing links may also provide useful information on blog quality.
I've noticed some interesting stuff coming out of Yale on the blog front. First on the law side with their blog supplementing the Yale Law Review and a possible Law meme. Now this coming from the business school. Harvard may have gotten earlier buzz from their blog work, but Yale looks to be a player.
Technorati Tags: blog research
I couldn't agree more with the Yale findings. I have only had my Blog up for 2 weeks and haven't been shy about linking to "competing" blogs i read and that tend to break stories. I hope to at one point be able to do the same but for now I tend to aggregate more than originate and I have been impressed with my traffic thus far.
I was actually searching for a study from Yale about 100 Positive Selling words and 100 negative selling words, but this was very interesting and helped confirm a suspicion of mine. Also, I've noticed that search engines get an idea of what your site is about from what kind of sites your outgoing links lead to.
Can repost this article on my new blog and give attribution for it? Or just post an excerpt from it and link back to the article as opposed to merely posting a link? I suppose I could write a synopsis.. I like the idea of a trackback, but I want to provide my readers with more information that a plain old link.