Audiences Are More Engaged Than Ever
2009 was a big year for publishers. Audience engagement with content has once again grown by 30% percent, even as the balance of engagement has changed dramatically. On-site engagement has dropped over 50%, while off-site engagement, now over 80% of most publishers’ total engagement, has skyrocketed!
PostRank gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, like Twitter, Digg, and Delicious over the course of 2009. That data represents the hard work of thousands of bloggers, and is the backbone of our Analytics, Data Services, and content filtering services.
With more competition than ever for audience’s attention, we wanted to award those bloggers whose hard work and great content most engaged and grew their audiences over the past year.
Which brings us to… The Top Blogs of 2009!
We crunched all of the 2 billion metrics from the past year to rank the blogs by their engagement within each topic populated by our users. In total, we selected nearly 500 topics (491 to be precise) containing 15725 total blogs, and built a detailed profile for the performance of each site – their overall rank, their engagement profile over the entire year, and their top posts as determined by their audience.
Awards methodology
Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009. However, we didn’t feel that handing out just one award per topic (Most Engagement) told the whole story, so we are highlighting three notable achievements per topic:
- Most Engagement
- Most Influential
- Biggest Movers & Shakers
To determine the winners of Most Engagement, we identified each post that the audience interacted with in 2009 for each site, calculated the total engagement points per post, and then determined the total amount of engagement for each site over the course of the year. From there, it was simply a matter of ranking the blogs by who got the most points overall in each topic.
We’ve awarded bragging rights to each topic’s Most Influential bloggers as well. We determined who they are by calculating who averaged the most engagement per post over the course of the year. Would consistent efforts at engaging the audience win the day, or would a handful of posts gone viral be enough to claim the crown? Find out!
We also wanted to recognized those who worked their butts off this year, and have the audience and influence growth to show for it. Those bloggers who showed the biggest engagement growth over the course of the year have been awarded our Biggest Movers & Shakers award. Will these folks will win the Most Engagement award next year?
We couldn’t have done it without you!
Now, we know this extravaganza is totally v1.0. And a really big example of crowdsourcing. So no, it’s not perfect. There will be some duplication and inconsistency, and I’m sure we’ll hear cries of, “Hey, I’m not included in _____ topic!” (Good thing that’s very easy to rectify!)
It’s inevitable, but if we waited til it was perfect, it’d never happen. And we’re all about making things happen. Plus, realistically, with a few thousand people involved, what is the definition of “perfect”, anyway?
All that said, we’re really jazzed about the results, and hope you’ll find it interesting and useful. We’re also incredibly grateful to our user community for being such a big part of building it. With your continued help, it’s only going to get better for 2010 and beyond!
Bragging rights!
All of our winners can claim badges on their blog pages to announce their triumph, and everyone included in the topics list can grab the badge that displays their rank. Each blogger’s page will also conveniently display their Top 10 posts for 2009, which easily facilitates those “Best Of…” posts. (Readers love getting shortcuts to the good stuff.)
Will your blog be on top in 2010?
Check out the Top Blogs of 2009 and see how your blog stacks up, or just find great new content to read on all the topics you’re interested in!
And, of course, if your blog is not included within the topics, make sure to add it to be included next year!