Comfort and The Ranking of Wine Blogs
I like neatly ordered lists. I'm not a control freak, but I find a certain amount of order in all things to be comforting.
Bringing order to the emerged world of wine blogs has been a topic of conversation with many of my PR colleagues. We only want to know what a blogger's audience size is, what they write about and, if possible, a little bit about the demographics of their audience. Is that too much to ask?
In the PBW (Pre-Blog-World), this kind of information was easy to come by for magazines, newspapers, television and radio. It was all neatly measured by third parties and presented to marketers and PR folks for our consideration, particularly if we have advertsing money to spend.
Wine blogs are a different animal, yet marketers and PR folks still want to known who draws the most eyeballs, what those eyeballs do for a living and, if possible, whether or not those eyeballs are old enough to need glasses.
Here are three Wine Blog/Site Ranking Systems that attempt to quantify the "Popularity" of Wine Blogs. Are they accurate? I don't know. I don't really care. I just like a little order in my life.
A LA WINE.COM's Most Popular Wine Blog Rankings
CELLARER's Most Popular Wine Sites
Very nice list. Good job on where you rank! There is a reason for that…
Most of these sites list horribly inaccurate statistics and traffic.
Some intentionally do not include all sites and blogs.
Speaking of lists:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s11e14-the-list
As a neophyte, it seems to me rankings should also consider # of “comments” as this would seem to indicate how interesting the blogger’s topics are and more importantly, how engaged his/her readers are. In this regard, I don’t understand how Heimoff’s blog was not even listed in the WIKIO ranking…unless I missed it somehow?? From my occasional perusal of wine blogs his seems to be more consistently engaged than most others.
Im thinking there is a subliminal message in there somewhere.
Tom, I understand your desire for lists. However when it comes to wine blogs, you’re out of luck. We have no idea how these ranking services (including the 3 you list) actually work. They are in all likelihood wildly inaccurate. My blog is consistently in the top 5 or 6 at some services but barely makes it onto two of yours. Until there is some universally recognized, accurate ranking (like a Nielsen or Gallup Poll), you might as well ignore the current ones as completely misleading.
Steve,
Actually all these ranking services do describe how they come to their rankings. That said, you’re point is well taken. From a marketers perspective, what I mostly want are readership numbers, demographics of readers and focus of content. Still….the comfort of a well ordered list..Ahhhh.
The problem with these listings is that they display only information they feel is important, and don’t have consistency across the board. At best, most demographic services border are biased, at worst they border on scams in my opinion. But, I have to agree…As long as you have a good list there…
Tyler Long
Norcross GA