Just this once, I am going to say something a lot of science writers, and almost all scientists, will disagree with but my assumption is that if you bothered to get past the title, you are already doing quality writing and want more people to read you; volume counts.
‘Content is king’ is a mantra in the media world but that doesn’t mean quality is the only aspect of content. I like triangles, I can make any complex subject into a triangle, and this is a triangle also. Along with quality, on the other triangle points you also have endurance and quantity. Successful communicators inhabit some point in the space interpolated between the nodes of that writing triangle, based on their preference and style.
On Science 2.0 I have seen any number of excellent writers who have written one or a few pieces, never to write for the wide audience again. In the long tail of science media success, that is good – for Science 2.0, anyway. More diverse voices is just better because over time it will reach people we otherwise would not reach and the bulk of the contributors there never look at what their traffic is, nor do they care. I don’t put this article there because the comments I would get are along the lines of ‘this is not a science piece and we don’t care about traffic’ but I know someone in science media cares about traffic and so this is for them, even if the audience will be 1/1000th of what I would get if I put it there.
See, even for me, numbers don’t always matter as much as quality readership.
In an Internet world full of noise, everything is basically a competitor. Getting someone to like you enough to put you in their newsfeed is much more difficult than it once was. Depending on the way they found you, stickiness may also drop dramatically. If someone put your article on a social news site like Reddit.com or Slashdot.org, for example, you may get a few hundred to tens of thousands of readers but that is their community and your article is a guest, that does not mean they are going to move in with you. If 1/10th of 1% bookmark or put you in their newsfeed, that is a decent response. For the most part, your article is a discussion point for them in their community and it is a one-off. One article on Science 2.0 has a few dozen comments on the article itself and only around 100,000 reads but on one social news site alone it has 65,000 comments and counting – no one commenting has probably read the article in two years, they are discussing the idea in the article in their own community.
So quantity helps in that if you are writing every day, you are more likely to stumble onto topics someone in the gigantic science community will like enough to come back. It is obvious that writing on one topic once a week has a narrow ranger of readers. The science audience is gigantic. The fact that the science audience is huge, 70 million people just in the US, but only 2% of them read any blog site tells you there are a lot of readers we aren’t reaching yet.
There’s more than just quantity in science, obviously. The knock I hear from serious science writers regarding some bloggers is that they clearly troll for pageviews by throwing up a bunch of links or write two sentences of opinion and then reference real work by a writer. But quantity alone does work in other places. One content farm slave pulled back the curtain on AOL – a company successful enough they could buy another huge content farm, Huffington Post, and revealed that large media companies only care about quantity and keywords. Quality is irrelevant, they just want people to go and click a More link to get another ad. Obviously there is no AOL of science blogging, Science 2.0 is around the same traffic as National Geographic’s Scienceblogs.com and Discover’s blogging group, but it means that model could easily work. Do a search for almost anything and you are likely go get either Wikipedia or answers.yahoo.com, neither of which are written by experts – thus, a content farm with even a few devoted experts, around six people who cover their general science categories, doing simple content for 8-10 hours a day like AOL people do, could be very successful.
Between a full-on quantity focus and writing journal articles, there is a middle ground, and my impression can’t be considered real data, but after four years of watching at least one site’s ebb and flow, it looks like writing once a day is enough to build an audience that will be your audience and not just Google search people who bounce. I write multiple times per day but it isn’t necessary. On Science 2.0, a fellow named Gunnar De Winter started in June and in July had 40,000 readers. That isn’t taking over the Internet but without being a big name or making fun of religion or Republicans, it is a good curve for someone starting from scratch. His articles are all good, and not too long, usually under 1,000 words – and he wrote just about every day in July. As the month went on his readers per article grew on a curve, with spikes here and there based on the topic. Here’s my triangle and two other contributors over there, substantially differ from me in style and approach.
Physicist Tommaso Dorigo, red, has been writing a long time – people know he is going to write and his quality will be high. Quantity is irrelevant. My green dot is a lot of quantity but shorter pieces and not always science but sometimes related to policy instead, so less quality. New writer Gunnar, blue, writes every day and the quality is high so it is just time before he reaches a big audience.
P.Z. Myers of Scienceblogs.com is arguably the most successful blogger in science – if anyone claims more traffic than him, they’d need to prove it. He combines quantity – he always has something to say and blogging is his way to say it, rather than Twitter or Facebook – with persistence. He has been blogging for well over a decade. He doesn’t need to write 1,000 word articles, his audience is so large people will show up because they want to get his perspective by now. His perspective is the quality but it took a lot of work to achieve that.
Most science writers don’t have that luxury and short snippets will annoy people who do the work to come to your site but a blog updated once a week is not going be a destination. Writing once a day seems to be that middle ground for people who want to do the work and have a sizable audience as a reward – but once a day is a lot of quantity for most scientists.