The Web's Dirty Little Secret

howtosplitanatom.com

30 points·inglorian··6 comments

"Writing about technology on the web is like building a Starbucks in Manhattan — it seems like a great idea until you look across the street."

So true...

It's why I was always impressed by Mashable. I followed it when it was just Pete Cashmore, because a few Digg posts by him seemed quite interesting. I was awed at how he managed to worm his way into the mainstream tech community by garnering Digg followers, until now his site is one of the biggest out there.

It takes a lot of dedication to do that sort of thing nowadays. It's impressive when somebody succeeds.

But it's just as true for all the "mainstream" topics he points to as easy traffic magnets. There are a zillion people trying to make money writing about celebrity gossip, too.

http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/

Crazy amount of tech blogs at the top. There might be fewer people who care about startups than Paris Hilton, but the startup lovers are online 14 hours a day, while the Paris Hilton obsessives can't even spell DSL, let alone subscribe to it.

What the internet thinks is interesting has little relation to what the overall population thinks is.

You'd be surprised, at least in the US. For example, perezhilton.com seems to have twice as much traffic as techcrunch.com according to Alexa and Quantcast. I have no doubt that Technorati's metrics are much less reliable (authority? number of fans?). Check out the Quantcast top 100:

http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

Would you have guessed that Walmart would be at #21?

More than half of all US homes have broadband. How many startup lovers do you think are out there? Also, how many people surf the web at work to pass the time every day?

When I started reading this I thought it was going to be about voting rings...

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