How Many People Are Listening to What You Have to Say?

Posted on 18 October 2007

The best way to measure the influence of any blogger is readership (traffic). Thanks to companies like Feedburner and Alexa, we can measure readership statistics and trends. In fact, displaying RSS and traffic rank stats in a visible place on a blog is one of the best ways to advertise (and measure) the popularity of a site. Some might even argue that it’s a marketing technique that turns a popular blog into a REALLY popular blog overnight, as visitors subscribe in droves just to see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that I find it totally fascinating in the geekiest possible way that a single person/blogger can develop a readership in the tens of thousands a DAY. Can you imagine 50 to 100 thousand people getting an email or a feed every single time you posted a thought or an idea? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to picture that many people in one physical space paying attention to one person. To put it in perspective, it’s the equivalent of an entire football stadium listening to one person sing the national anthem. Considering that the most popular blogs are posting daily, some of them multiple times a day, the “who’s-paying-attention” figures can be staggering.

When the numbers get astronomical, and become comparable to, say, the head count at Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a Dream Speech (+200 thousand according to Wikipedia), you can only hope that the blogger responsible is well informed, well intentioned and that they realize how turbulent and tumultuous the blogosphere can be when anything highly controversial is subject to viral linking on a massive scale (you can thank viral linking for what happened to Miss Teen USA South Carolina - 2 minutes of complete idiocy in a stunned moment on national TV, and she gets 17 million views on YouTube).

Of course, I didn’t mention the crowd at the I have a dream speech accidentally, I was trying to subtly make a point - One can only imagine how the availability of free blogging technologies could have changed and influenced Vietnam protesting efforts, the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage (to name a few). Would people have organized differently? Would outspoken radicals have built online communities? Would the message have had greater reach? Would more people have contributed to the conversation, anonymously or otherwise, from the safety of their homes? It’s a different world now than it was then - you can’t ignore the power of numbers just because the people who are paying attention are disbursed and invisible.

Whether you blog or not, how many people are listening to what you have to say in any given day?