What do Indian Blog Readers like to do? Part 2
In my previous post we discussed that very few (around 10%) readers of Indian Blogs leave comments. One of the reader (Vikas) left a comment saying that there aren’t enough bloggers in India who write posts which can be commented on. Most of blogs are informational. I think, I agree to that point. I decided to dig some more data from Pluggd.in blog by Ashish, which received the most number of comments (around 260) in April 2008. Here is another beautiful graph.
The graph above compares types of posts with the number of comments. I classified the posts into News Items (mostly quoted from the main stream media), Original Content (posts on entrepreneurship etc), New Product or Feature Launch, Start Up Launch and Miscellaneous Items which includes job postings. This graph shows that News, Original Posts and Product or Feature Launch has the most comments. But there is another important variable which is the number of posts in each category. There were more News Items.
To complete the analysis, I have plotted the posts versus comments per post which will give a better idea on the type of post which receives maximum comments. See the graph below.
Based on this graph, we can see that posts that carries news items which is not readily available in the mainstream media carries most discussion. Here it is for original content and launch of a startup, product etc. There are very few blogs which carries original content on regular basis. So I personally think that there is a huge gap which needs to be filled in by the experts. And definitely existing blogs can ramp up their coverage with quality content. (Please note, the data from Pluggd.in is used for representation and views on this post are generic.)
Still being on the subject of business news, there is an interesting study by Wharton on Business Publications in India. In US, magazine and news publishers have built strong online presence due to dwindling readership of print version. It seems that that phenomenon is not true for India at this moment. Blame lower internet penetration!
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very interesting analysis - from what I have seen, most of the readers comment only when the post carries
a. some interesting insight/perspective - and they feel a ‘deja-vu’ experience.
b. a breaking story - unlike US, we don’t really have any breaking tech story..
c. solve a pain and ‘how-to’ type of posts (in a typical lifehacker fashion).
I agree with you that existing blogs can ramp up their coverage with quality content and original ideas.
Good analysis!!
-Ashish