Mint Digital

Everyone’s talking about blogging as a tool for business communication. The Economist had a piece this week on Scobelizer. Hugh Mcleod at gapingvoid is excited about using a blog to promote his pal, tailor Thomas Mahon.

I like blogs and I’d love to see them edge out traditional PR. But it is is worth noting that blog poularity follows a zipf distribution. Put simply, a few bloggers get most of the traffic… and most bloggers get hardly any.

Reading a successful blog makes publicity sound effortless. Something about their immediacy makes you feel like you could easily be as widely read as Seth Godin. You’d never start rapping hoping to sell records like Eminem.

Economic analysis suggests that in a market with no barriers to entry (like blogging) any marginal benefit - above what you’d expect to earn from doing something else - will soon getting competed away.

But then, economists make terrible entrepreneurs. A economist wouldn’t bend down to pick up a stray £10 note found lying on the floor, thinking that if it was really was a £10 note it would already have been picked up.