Brilliant Blogging Idea: Feature Least Popular Posts Instead of Most Popular Ones
by
on October 01, 2008,
It looks like AOL is determined to build a very large network of programming websites serving niche content to all types of audiences. Only last week we covered AOL launching two new websites - one of them focused on female interests and the second one about pop culture. At the same time the company reported significant growth of all of its programming websites and even claimed that Asylum, it’s site targeted at male audience, is the top one in its niche. I believe that this success prompts AOL to go even further - a couple of days ago the company announced launch of yet another website for local entertainment news.
The website, named Digital City, is intended to provide entertainment news with some local information from various cities around the world. The content on the site is either published by staff writers or aggregated from a number of participating blogs that provide information about the cities their authors are based in.
So the site looks very much like a blogging network that both aggregates content to the home page and also features some stories published by the network owners. But this is not what I wanted to highlight in this post about the new AOL’s site as there was something truly unusual that caught my attention there.
Same as many blogging-focused websites, Digital City features a number of quite usual content blocks like most popular and most commented posts. But there was also something unusual: in addition to featuring the most popular content like many bloggers already do, the site also has a special block for “least popular stories” to showcase the articles that received less attention from the audience. And I immediately thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea for many bloggers.
Right now we usually try to give some special placement to the most popular stories hoping that they will be appealing enough for visitors to click through from the main page to yet another post elsewhere. So the already popular stories get more popular while those that lack attention from readers, don’t get any more of it anyway.
The irony is that an already popular post may already have a number of incoming links that will ensure good ranking with search engines for this post. But you will still have tons of content on your blog that will remain unnoticed and will not even bring any search traffic to your blog in the long run.
I think that all the bloggers may have some pretty good stories that did not receive enough attention, pageviews or comments simply because they were published on a wrong day: say, on a day when Google launched Chrome or T-Mobile G Phone was introduced if you cover technology news on your blog. On such days of big industrial events trying to write about anything else but the hot topics of the day usually results in virtually no one reading those non-trendy posts.
So I thought that it could be quite a good idea to have a special place on a blog to showcase the least popular stories - who knows, if the readers found their titles intriguing enough to click on them, those stories could eventually move from the least popular to the most popular section. I have not found any plug-ins that could handle this problem but I do hope this problem will be recognized by developers and bloggers will eventually be offered a way to get more attention to less popular stories instead of making already popular posts even more popular.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
It is true that the cream always rises to the top but, as in most creative fields, there are still a lot of talented people waiting to be recognized. I’m not surprised that AOL has come up with some creative idea’s because, basically they have no choice. It sounds like they did their research thou, especially in targeting women. The highest Ad revenue online come from female audiences. I guess AOl isn’t just going to roll over and die, like many might like. We are just going to have to wait and see if their new found business savvy pays off.
Michael, good to see you share my idea on the creative approach to pushing some content that needs attention at readers. And it is very true that AOL is really in a situation when the company simply needs to come up with creative ideas as it does not have any choices.
Their niche sites I’ve seen all look quite decent but I did not feel the female one quite attractive - it looked good but lacked serious topics or serious approach to covering typical feminine topics maybe. But I am definitely no typical female internet user so chances are their site will grow popular in that field as well. But judging from their report from last week on the general success of their programming site I would not expect the company die in the near future either, honestly.
I was just brainstorming this idea. From a blog building stand point, featuring posts that have under 10 comments could be a good way to influence reading and commenting. Research shows that most people don’t read past the first 10 comments.
Mike, interesting idea about featuring posts based on the number of comments, definitely makes sense, especially from a reader’s point of view as I think many people will not want to read many comments to leave a comment of their own and will choose to forget it simply not to repeat something another person said 20 comments before.