Just How Popular are List Posts?
Magazines have always known the power of a good list. Look at the covers on your local newsstand and you’ll see plenty of “5 tips to shed your winter pounds” or “10 ways to save on your home loan” type headlines. This style of content just works, and if you’re a blogger, you’d be wise to pay attention.
Today I was looking through the traffic on our app review blogs AppStorm, and decided to make use of a handy Google Analytics feature called Content Drilldown which lets you view stats for content by the directories they sit in.
So on AppStorm we publish lots and lots of app reviews, some how-to posts, and a weekly roundup or two. Knowing how popular list posts are, I figured our roundups would be the most trafficked. Here’s an example of our most recent roundup of 5 Places to Find Free Mac Software.
A typical AppStorm Roundup Post
Thanks to category permalinks in WordPress, the three types of content sit in /reviews, /howto and /roundups, so they are perfect for comparing traffic. Over the last month, here are the numbers:
- Roundups: 843,024 Pageviews
- Reviews: 126,161 Pageviews
- How-To: 95,905 Pageviews
In other words, on AppStorm, list posts average almost SEVEN times as much traffic as the blog’s mainstay of reviews and almost NINE times as much as our how-to content! Here’s the screengrab:
Why not publish only lists?
Of course when you see these kinds of numbers you’d be forgiven for wondering why we don’t publish only list posts. After all, assuming they are less than seven times as expensive to write, they are clearly the most cost effective posts to publish.
The reality is that list posts don’t build a great blog. The problem with lists themselves is that they tend to lack a voice. When a publication has no voice, there’s really nothing to differentiate it from another publication that publishes similar lists.
Rather I think of them as traffic traps to catch new readers and to introduce them to our regular content types: reviews and how-to posts. Of course some readers will also stay purely for the lists, and even the people who love our reviews will also be enjoying the lists. But it all needs to be in balance.
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love this type of data. thanks for sharing it.
definitely a well-rounded blog includes a particular “voice”. what you might lose in traffic you gain in personality and sustainability.
Have you taken into account the quantity of posts in each category?
Hey Martin, that’s an excellent question! There are about 10-20% more review posts than roundups so there is actually an even bigger gap in how much traffic each post brings in!
It makes sense though given the way usability studies have shown we ingest content on the web. Scanning is aided by a list of headings and so content is easier to digest.
@Prydie
Depressing to hear but predictable I suppose. Ultimately the discerning reader sees through these “traffic traps” as you so aptly describe them as nothing more than that.
Magazines may know the power of a good list but they don’t abuse them to the extent that stats-obsessed bloggers do.
I think that the hate for list-posts doesn’t apply to some blogs. Appstorm is one of them. The roundups that are posted on Appstorm cannot easily be found anywhere else, because the idea behind the blog is somewhat unique.
Compared to design blogs, which have been getting flamed recently, all post the same kind of lists:
- 10 Awesome Grunge Websites
- 15 Inspiring WordPress Themes
- 20 Fresh New Logos Using Whitespace
And so on and so forth. But the fact of the matter is, all of these blogs just grab their content from galleries around the web (and even from other blogs). And almost every single blog gets their “fresh and new” content from these galleries (which in turn copy submissions from each other).
Try searching for an article about websites using paper textures; chances are there will be a dozen blogs. Now, I challenge you to find a site that is NOT featured on at least half a dozen of those blogs. It’s ridiculous!
David, that’s so true
I seldom look at posts containing “top 10″ or some other suggestion of a list. I find the lists generally not useful: I don’t generally enjoy or get inspiration reading the exact same article a 2nd time or fifteenth time if it was posted on Noupe or something.
I guess the only advantage of these lists are getting your work recognized and maybe generating additional traffic to your site. I do believe that a weekly round of the top posts or maybe top posts by visits could be useful to a reader though.
David, I think you’ve nailed it. This is why some list posts work, and some don’t.
If you’re going to write a list post, at least choose a subject that hasn’t already been done to death by other bloggers.
I guess the next question is how to differentiate our list post. There are so many list post in blog and it made everyone bored.
I think the key is to find a way to reap the benefits of list posts without actually publishing generic round-ups. I’ve been finding on Nettuts+ that, if we focus less on “X Examples of…” and more on “X Techniques,” we still receive bunches of traffic — but also still… teach.
That’s an excellent point! As David mentioned above the web dev / design niche is incredibly saturated with generic roundups, so taking this route is a clever thing to do.
For AppStorm the niche is not quite so saturated and we can be a bit more brazen and still provide value – I think
Some valuable points made!
Lists posts for all intent and purposes are pretty useful on the whole, I will openly admit sometimes when I’m looking for a grunge texture I would rather see a list rather than a review.
I’m for list posts but the key would be to ensure the content is unique. As @david mentioned there are many that are reused/rehashed on many sites, so its beneficial to be unique with the list posts.
List posts mostly suck but they are sometimes useful (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view).
It’s generally quite obvious which blogs simply copy-paste from other blogs or from the descriptions of whatever “inspiring” things or “helpful” apps they’re linking to. Those “inspiration” posts in particular are among the worst I’ve seen as far as providing content that is worth half a damn is concerned.
I’ve recently started putting list post-laden blogs in a separate folder in Google Reader from my other web-related stuff. I call that folder “Develospam” because, really, that’s all they are. And it makes perfect sense why people run these blogs like they do: list posts get big payoffs for very little work.
Why spend four hours writing and tweaking a tutorial or researching something new when you can spend 30 minutes throwing together a brainless list post with some pretty pictures? Especially when that list post is going to get much more traffic!
It’s probably not just because people like scanning lists; it probably has a lot to do with Google. When your site is linked to from a lot of other sites it goes up in the search rankings and becomes even more visible. These list post blogs copy-paste and share/steal with/from one another, and it pushes them all up in ranking and visibility.
I’m hoping this rampant list post circlejerk bandwagon is a fad that will quickly fade away before it gets difficult to find good content.
PS: I love the giant typography on this site. I’m not a netsetter but I’m subscribing to this site just so I can enjoy not having to squint at my monitor for once.
“30 minutes throwing together a brainless list post with some pretty pictures? Especially when that list post is going to get much more traffic!”
I don’t know what kind of world you live in, but i does not take 30 minutes to create a list post. I takes at least 2 hours if not more, from personal experience. Then again i only find high quality items for my lists.
Those are some excellent points. Thank you for sharing. Personally, I do not like those posts, and I thought that those would be least popular. Like many have mentioned, the question is, what to do a list post of?
Demand Media disagrees with this idea of ‘voice’
I, however, agree that a site should have a voice, and not be a just a black hole sucking people in with ’6 ways to clean your computer’ or some crap.
Please contact us about the real estate theme – urgent help needed
Thank you,
Collis, do you have any data on Nettuts Quick Tips vs. Screencast Series vs. In-Depth Articles?
I get the feeling that Quick Tips will be on top, followed by Screencasts, and lastly lengthy articles.
People (including myself) have to work at least 40 hrs/wk creating something. We don’t have time to study. So if we have the option of reading a huge article which may or may not give us the info we need, or skimming through a roundup for an article that is EXACTLY what we need, we’re going to skim.
I think the key is to find a way to reap the benefits of list posts without actually publishing generic round-ups. I’ve been finding on Nettuts+ that
of course list post is more effective because it bring more traffic and quality traffic as well. Most of listing website do have those quality traffic and high PR. You may take advantages from there and try to link them to your site. As long you post those post which is related and useful then you able to bring big amount of traffic from there to your site. It maybe useful then you post to those unknown website. Because you need post lot to get the same quality traffic from one listing website. Quality may win over quantities.