“Which blogs are the most popular?”
It’s a question I’ve started hearing again lately, especially as many of my work colleagues have begun experimenting with social media. This is an unanswerable measurement question, just like for analyst relations or marine terminal gates.
To try to answer the question, many people cite Technorati’s Top Blogs as a ranking of blog traffic. Only it’s not.
Technorati’s top 5 ranked blogs as of Feb 1, 2010 are as follows:
The Technorati Authority metric is based on the number of inbound links to a site. While this is a reasonable proxy for influence, it’s not necessarily the same thing as traffic. (Although I admit there may be a loose correlation.)
So what are the most popular blogs based on traffic?
The best estimate that I can find comes from a site called eBizMBA which ranks blogs by a combination of inbound links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.
According to eBizMBA, the top 5 sites are:
Of course, just because a blog is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. As an example, Time Magazine’s 25 Best Blogs of 2009 don’t include most of the ones listed above. In fact, a few of them are listed in the most overrated category.
Inbound links, traffic, and a magazine’s subjective assessment. Three different measures which can each be used to track the same thing. It’s a common performance management problem. The measurement definition is more important than the measure value.
Posted by Jonathan 
