Sunday, November 2, 2008

On Internet Popularity

You publish the same writers Thieves Jargon does, but the reason your journal sucks is because you only update once every three months. Since nobody is going to read it except for writers looking for someplace to publish their work, what you need to do to become attractive to those big-money advertisers is inflate your site traffic. The best way to do that, aside from embedding phrases like "hot young bitches" in your meta coding, is to have new content all the time. Other sites may feature more overall content, but you'll be able to say, "Commitment" and use an exclamation mark if you like. You'll get the same amount of total visitors, but they're going be checking in more often, and your numbers will go up.

But what I'm getting at here is Every Day Yeah just turned one year old. Check out their year one retrospective: Click here. That's 365 acts of creative graffiti from somebody who understands this important marketing concept. Very cool.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think there are more routes to getting popular... I also think that someday, coming soon, there will be readers, strictly readers, surfing the lit.net as well...

Have a forum, like this one: hub.mourningsilence.com

Matt DiGangi said...

Message board or blog, my numbers always go through the roof when PHM is popping off.

Where do you think this shift from print ro electronic is going to come from? As in, what will change to cause it?

Anonymous said...

Nothing to do with this- but I want to say YES! to Alex Melnick and her little stunner, made more stunning by the following entry by Molly Jones (which was good but clever) on the same objective subject and from the same fictional POV. I hope Melnick stays good and compact and avoids becoming deliberate.

Anonymous said...

What journal is your post referring to, Matt? There are many journals whose writer pool overlaps with that of Thieves Jargon and only update their content every couple of months.

P. H. M. said...

I say the economy will be the first major thing, because people want to read new shit... and libraries are not convenient... I think a general societal shift from analog to digital technologies is going to be a big part of it. Lots of this is just feeling, too.

Matt DiGangi said...

((What journal is your post referring to, Matt? There are many journals whose writer pool overlaps with that of Thieves Jargon and only update their content every couple of months.))

Which ones am I NOT talking about?

I know that there are plenty of online quarterlies running outstanding work, but I can't help but feel like waiting three months to put out a new issue online plays against the few strengths of online publishing.

Online loses to print every day of the week when it comes to quality work published because you just can't run anything with any length online and expect people to read it. The online experience is all about pace and price (to both the reader and publisher). Due to expenses and design and distribution, a quarterly print pace is perfectly reasonable. Online quarterlies though, old news.

Anonymous said...

one advantage of infrequent updating is that an author's work stays up on the main page longer, thereby giving the piece more exposure. if you displace it with something new everyday, it only takes a week or so for it to fall off the main page.

i understand that the site has an obligation to keep it fresh for the readers. but the readers of lit sites are mostly writers looking for markets, what can you do about it?

Anonymous said...

the few places that have gained a good rep like TJ and Zygote shutting down won't help. From my experience, people who want to just read aren't digging the net because they don't know where to look. There are so many sites and so many of them seem to be willing to publish anything. John Q believes the quality of the stuff on the net is inferior, and for the most part he's right. Hell, we've all been guilty in one way or another of wanting to "save our good stuff for print."
Longevity of a mag is key, whether it be print or online. It takes some time to establish a respected name. Maybe a writer or group of writers could make a difference by ONLY publishing in online mags. Talented, gutsy sonsabitches saying "Fuck You!" to the old school and declaring "If you want to read the good stuff, you gotta' check out the web."