Do you have too much to read?
Recently I was forced to reset my Google Reader account thanks to Google’s recent account clean up. The upside of this was that I had to resubscribe to any RSS feed I still wanted to read regularly. A few essentials were added first: Google’s Webmaster Central, SEOMoz, Distilled and so on. Then a few other favourites like Fred Wilson’s AVC blog and Mark Suster’s Both Sides Of The Table were added.
What really struck me though was the number of subscriptions I didn’t want to keep up with any more. This was largely for three reasons:
- I was no longer that interested in the topic
- The content was too repetitive
- The content volume and quality had spiralled out of control
For the first reason there was nothing the publisher could have done to keep me as a subscriber. For the second reason, it was possible but unlikely. Some of the topics were quite niche and there wasn’t a lot new to say on a regular basis. However the third reason is completely within every publisher’s control.
Straying From The Original Plot
I’ll pick out Mashable as an example. It’s quite a regular occurrence that when I open my reader in the morning there are 30 or 40 stories in the Mashable folder. Buried in there somewhere are the one or two that I might still find interesting, but there is no way I’m going wade through the rest to find them, especially considering that another more focused blog is bound to reblog it, or someone in my Twitter stream will tweet about it.
Mashable, along with a growing number of other web properties, seem to be obsessed with growing visitor numbers at the expense of focus and even quality control, and in doing so they publish so often and on so many topics that I’m no longer interested in what Mashable has to offer. The same can be said for a growing number of blogs that are looking to grow visitors numbers by growing the number of articles they publish per day.
A Pivot From Niche To Mainstream
Mashable is supposed to be about Social Media News and Web Tips according to it’s own homepage <title> tag. So why is it publishing a story today about the new HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio? And what about its article on Expanding Your Startup To International Markets? Or even the new version of VMware Fusion? Quite simply they know that these articles will gather traffic because they know they can rank easily. But should they publish them in the first place?
I guess the question comes down to this. Do Mashable just want as much traffic as they can get their hands on, or do they want to be the go to source for social media news? Do they want to be mainstream or niche? The answer in this particular case seems pretty clear to me. Maybe they will succeed in becoming the next Wired, and if that’s what they want, good luck to them. But in the meantime, when I want some social media news, I’ll go to a social media specialist source.
My tip? Unless you’re trying to be come a broad news aggregator stick to what you know, and what your readers want, and make sure you have something to say. If that means publishing less often, so be it, but at least you know that the resulting relevant traffic will be because of the quality of your content and not just because of the volume of articles you publish.
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