Yeah, Mother Jones excluded them not because their money is kosher, but because it's difficult to classify these entities. That or the liberal Mother Jones is just biased ;)
First of all, thank you for the thoughtful reply - this is one of the things I love most about running this site.
I'm not saying that we should turn Neatorama into (yet another) Buzzfeed or Viralnova clone, but having run this blog since 2005, I've learned that one thing is constant: we have to adapt and evolve.
The web that this blog "grew up" in has changed. The way that content is discovered and consumed has changed. Commenting habit has changed (drastically, if I may add).
I'm not worried about pageviews: We were one of the first big blogs that eschewed splitting posts into multiple pages for the sake of pageviews. We've avoided slideshows for the exact same reason. You can view comments straight on the front page - no need to click to another page to do so. But I am worried about growing the unique visitors (a very hard metrics to grow).
One person's clickbaity title is another person's teaser headline, and it's a damned fine line we'd have to walk to experiment with new ways to grow traffic versus not losing our souls doing so. But one thing is certain: we have to experiment with new ways or risk dying a slow death.
I don't think we're in any danger of becoming a viralnova or a buzzfeed but what's wrong with a teaser headline every now and then? Or maybe we should do it more often because both Viralnova and Buzzfeed have *much* higher traffic level than little ol' Neato here ;)
Title is one of the key components of a blog post, and in the past, we've done quite well with descriptive (some would say boring) titles - but that was the world dominated by Google and common sense. Now, we live in the world of Facebook and its plenitude of mouthbreathers and I'm at loss of what to do.
Evolve or die, they say - but should we elect to evolve "down this dark path"? Or should we stay a relic and die a slow death into irrelevance?
I'm not saying that we should turn Neatorama into (yet another) Buzzfeed or Viralnova clone, but having run this blog since 2005, I've learned that one thing is constant: we have to adapt and evolve.
The web that this blog "grew up" in has changed. The way that content is discovered and consumed has changed. Commenting habit has changed (drastically, if I may add).
I'm not worried about pageviews: We were one of the first big blogs that eschewed splitting posts into multiple pages for the sake of pageviews. We've avoided slideshows for the exact same reason. You can view comments straight on the front page - no need to click to another page to do so. But I am worried about growing the unique visitors (a very hard metrics to grow).
One person's clickbaity title is another person's teaser headline, and it's a damned fine line we'd have to walk to experiment with new ways to grow traffic versus not losing our souls doing so. But one thing is certain: we have to experiment with new ways or risk dying a slow death.
Title is one of the key components of a blog post, and in the past, we've done quite well with descriptive (some would say boring) titles - but that was the world dominated by Google and common sense. Now, we live in the world of Facebook and its plenitude of mouthbreathers and I'm at loss of what to do.
Evolve or die, they say - but should we elect to evolve "down this dark path"? Or should we stay a relic and die a slow death into irrelevance?