The Dutchbloggies award (honestly: this is NOT translated) is won by sargasso a Dutch group blog. Radio online has an interview with them, as well as with Wim de Bie who won his second Dutchbloggy. Sargasso has won the award amongst other reasons because during the time of the referendum on Europe, they read the whole constitution bit by bit and blogged about it. After winning, their whole site was down because of the high number of visitors. In their experience blogging about your own field of expertise works best.Wim de Bie (famous Dutch television comedian) is one of the pioneers in experimenting with weblogs in the Netherlands, and now paid by the public broadcasting (publieke omroep) company VPRO and has at times upto 200.000 visitors per day; easily competing in audience with television programs. He is working fulltime on his blog/vlog and what works in his experience is blogging on a daily basis and incorporating personal items.
Soon coming up there will be a weekly newspaper, filled with blogposts.
Re: the blog of Wim de Bie, so my earlier remarks on the Dutch Dgroup discussion listing about volunteer vs. paid job is correct. That it makes more sense to pay volunteers. I will response and talk more about my own observations and opinions about volunteering.
ReplyDeleteBlogging generally speaking is a voluntary job. Most bloggers use blog to achieve whatever they set out to achieve. I have read blogs from PhD students looking for feedback, or blogs looking to promote thier knowledge and eventually hope to get a dream job in the area of their expertise, and other bloggers looking for other goals etc. I happened to know two persons that fit in these two examples respectively, PhD student and Dream job. AND NOW they both still blog, but occassionally.
Recently I learned about two bloggers, I would say well known, decided to give up blogging. One already stopped (some hit I read somewhere that might have conflict-of-interest with his 'real' paying job), the other is slowly phasing out.
SO, what are all these tell us? Blogging as a volunteer, generally will not last. Most bloggers drop out like flies in the very beginning, and those that persist generally would still drop out ONCE they achieved their goals. Goal is what keep blogger blogging. Take away their 'goal', there is not much to blog. Simple human behaviour.
BUT, would a PAID blogger mean more consistent, more steady, better quality blogging? Personally I think so.