Bloggers Blew It: Much Posting, Little Impact

Let’s gore a sacred cow. Or let’s let Frank Barnako of CBS MarketWatch’s Internet Daily do it. The headline above tops the commentary leading his report on Wednesday.

“No one reads blogs,” Barnako writes. Yes, Technorati is tracking 4 million blogs, RSS is no longer “a geek secret and now it’s a bolt-on to My Yahoo!”, and Blogads claims to be delivering 100 million banner-ad impression per month. “All that may be true. It’s just that after the presidential election, it appears to me that the only readers of blogs … are bloggers! They are a good group. Educated and engaged. But they’re also like mice in a rotating cage: running in place, bumping into the same old people.” Examining Comscore’s online traffic surveys, Barnako notes that “when the most popular political blog draws fewer than 270,000 visitors on Election Day, you’ve got to ask, ‘What’s the point?'”

Those are fighting words to blogger fundamentalists and might cause some a knee-jerk reaction to accuse Barnako of “not getting it” or perhaps of being a “big-media” guy simply because of the brand CBS behind his column. But Barnako gets it and has been for a long time. He’s a blogger, a Web-publishing pioneer (who helped found USAToday.com and helped found Quincy Jones‘ World Music Web venture), and has been reporting for the CBS News radio network about online since before the Internet was opened to the public.

Barnako concludes, “Bottom line: Political blogging is like Ralph Nader. Nobody pays attention.”