Blogs that apparently don't suck

I watched the first season of Betas on Amazon Prime. It is a Amazon produced series about a group of social app developers in San Francisco trying to become millionaires by launching a social media app that makes people put down their smartphones and hook up face to face. It is an interesting series filled with nerds/hipsters...nerdsters I guess. Or maybe hiperds. Then again they may be more geeksters or hipeeks. Whatever. I think you catch my drift.



I watched Betas in hopes it would better help me understand what is going on in the digital world of a generation who doesn't know what a can opener does. And then I remind myself that it is a scripted view of what someone wants us to think is going on in the world of the 20-somethings. In the Betas world, there are big time bloggers who are courted for a mention. And those bloggers are rich and famous.

Being a veteran blogger with limited success on the fame and fortune front, I was curious if such blogs and bloggers exist. According to information I found on the Internet (so you know it must be true) there are more than 152 million blogs out there. And a new blog is created every half second. That's 172,800 new blogs added every day (someone else did the math). So obviously there is lots of competition for readers.

But seriously, who is getting rich and famous blogging? According to eBizMBA the top 15 most popular blogs are:

1. Huffington Post
2. TMZ
3. Business Insider
4. Mashable
5. Gizmodo
6. LifeHacker
7. Gawker
8. The Daily Beast
9. Tech Crunch
10. Perez Hilton
11. Engadget
12. Cheezburger
13. Jezebel
14. Deadspin
15. Kotaku

And what do all of these blogs have that mine doesn't have? Well, readers, for one. All of them have have millions of readers per month. Now granted all of them seem to have huge staffs and are more online magazines than what I would consider a blog, but who am I to judge. They also all seem to be regurgitaters of news or gossip or both with very little original content. Which begs the question of where they are finding the content they are puking back up at their readers. I assume TMZ finds most of theirs in dumpsters.

None of these top blogs seem to feature Photoshopped images of my face on various animals, classic art or random objects. So I think I've got the advantage there. And none of the blogs seem to invest any effort in design or asthetics. Most seem to resemble a ransom note.

Another difference between the top blogs and mine is that they all seem to be raking in cash from advertising. The Huffington Post brings in about $900,000 a month. Mashable brings in almost $500,000 a month, and even Perez Hilton brings in almost $110,000 per month. I would be happy with a couple of hundred a month. Shoot I'd be happy with an Amazon gift card.

It's not that I aspire to be one of the top blogs (though the cash generated by being one would be nice). I just would like to generate a more robust readership than Blogger's Next Blog feature seems to bring me. For that reason I've stooped to using Twitter to try and increase traffic. This has exposed me to many indignities in efforts to increase my follower base.

I resorted to using a site called Twiends.com (which I assume is a bastardization of the words Twitter and Friends). When you sign up with Twiends, you get seeds for following other Twitter users who are also signed up with Twiends.  You then barter your seeds to other users if they follow you. The downside of Twiends is that you end up following a huge number of people who post things you have absolutely no interest in reading. Or they want to sell you things you have absolutely no interest in buying. And conversely, you generate a large number of followers who don't give a rats ass about anything you have to say.

Needless to say, most of my blog traffic is still generated by Blogger's Next Blog and Google searches for porn. And the latter visitors are sorely disappointed.

Oh well, I have to go sow some more seeds and see what the latest hip hop and scrapbooking tips I can pick up from my new Twitter friends.