Since launching SugarBank I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wondering where all the sex blogs are. Unlike the mainstream web which is saturated with good, bad and what-the-fuck-is-that porn (remember when the web was just porn and X10 camera pop-under ads? – the good old days…), the adult blog space seems a little weak. One major networked sex blog, a few huge TGP’s pretending to be blogs and a lot of lovingly handcrafted small sites seem to be all there is on offer. When I asked for recommendations earlier this week, people responded with all the enthusiasm of Nascar fans at an R. Kelly concert.
As I’m really only useful when I know what I’m talking about (or am completely naked ladies), I decided to investigate, and find out if the lack of sex(y) blogs was real or imagined.
I started by visiting Technorati. For all their flaws they do as good a job as anyone at providing a rough snapshot of what’s happening in the blog space. I looked up ten popular tags, and counted how many blogs were listed in each case:
The first interesting point is that Tags like ‘Gadgets’ which are very thoroughly and professionally blogged pull comparitively few blogs, likewise sex related tags aren’t used that often. Based on this it appears that the sex business doesn’t yet know the difference (wait for it) between its (WAIT for it) RSS and it’s elbow (YES! YES! Pure gold. Damn I’m funny.) Another conclusion might be that sex bloggers don’t tag, but in that case, we can assume as many sex-bloggers ignore their tags as those in the mainstram, and still make comparisons between categories. The other alternative is that there’s been a cooling effect, where the big blogs are so effectively dominating a niche that they’ve killed competition Google-Mart style.
I then looked at each tag in more detail. Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links from other blogs they have, counting the number of individual blogs linking as of primary importance, and the number of total links after that. I.e. ten links from ten different blogs means more to Technorati than ten (or twenty) links from the same blog – but Technorati does consider both numbers.
For each tag, I looked at the 20 blogs with the most links, and counted the number of linking blogs. Plotting the number of links against each blog results in a line which tells us more about what’s going on in each area of interest:
(click to enlarge)
I then did the same thing with the sex-related tags:
(click to enlarge)
In the graphs above, the area under each line represents the amount of activity in each category, while the shape of each line shows how strong the top blogs in each category are relative to each other.
‘Gadgets’ and ‘Blogs’ are both tags which the graph reveals are dominated by large blogs (Engadget and BoinBong in this case) which absorb the majority of links in the areas they cover. Conversely ‘Politics’ isn’t a tag dominated by any single blog, containing a large number of very strong blogs, all of whom share the link love reasonably evenly.
Of course, what’s most interesting to us is the weakness of the sex tags. Based on this graph it appears that the adult market, arguably the most profitable online, isn’t being actively contested. Despite thousands of companies, many of them with millions of dollars to spend, with a foot in the industry, sex tags appear to be underutilized.
Fleshbot is currently the market leading sex-blog (probably followed by Erosblog – which may get more pageviews but isn’t formally networked and has a lower profile), and many babelogs get the kind of traffic most mainstream websites find hard to process (millions of pageviews a day). Could they be having a cooling effect and be responsible for the low use of sex tags? Not unless Technorati is blind to the biggest blogs in the marketplace, and that could only happen if they’re choosing not be listed (Fleshbot?) or not using tags.
The point is RSS has changed the rules. Powerful websites were good at attracting raw traffic, but dominating in the blog space, and attracting the high-quality visitors who choose to subscribe to what you have to say, means being good at generating links-in. Right now, the sex arena (which is where I sometimes play nice, and other times rough ladies), is still wide open. Due to choice, error or ignorance, the biggest sex-blogs are still thinking like websites.
What’s the upshot of this brief analysis?
- If you think you’ve ‘missed out’ on the porn boom, these numbers should give you pause for thought, in the blog space – things have only just begun.
- The number of blogs that link to you matters (which is where the bloggasm can make a big difference. Links from small blogs carry equal weight to links from large blogs within Technorati, so the size of the blogs linking to you isn’t that important.)
- If you’re not tagging you’re missing out on a lot of interest. People looking for sex-based content using tags don’t have much to choose from right now.
Popularity: 52% [?]
I think that as the blog trend continues, the little guys will continue to be overtaken by the big guys. The Washington Post, for example, is now written like a blog and if it’s registered on Technorati as such and other news agencies do the same, notable personal blogs will get lost in the crowd.
Perhaps it’s best to introduce a new name and form a sub blog culture in order to keep the alternatives prevelant.
Good idea, Kitka- it really is becoming a problem. Bloggers without advertising budgets or media contacts can still be quality. All the big guys link to each other (one thing I like about the bloggasm- it’s equal opportunity) and I think it’s important for the more established bloggers to actively hunt for good new blogs.
Sad but true- I hadn’t bothered to register at Technorati until a few days ago. Part of it I think is that non-sex bloggers often do it to establish professional credit, so they take their blogs very seriously, whereas sex blogging for a lot of people is a hobby, so they might spend less time figuring out extras and promotion. It seems like adult in general is just now figuring out blogs. Considering they’ve been around in some form (and prominent) since ‘99 it’s kind of embarrassing.
Kitka – good point. That said – the mainstream seldom dabbles in sex. There’s no reason why small blogs can’t become big blogs (that’s just what happened with sex websites). The only thing that can’t happen is for small blogs to maintain their position in the pack as the blog-space gets bigger. As the pond grows the fish have to as well, I guess its time for some bloggers to make a decision, standing still is going backwards now…
Katie, that sex sites aren’t on top of blogging is pretty amazing. It’s mostly because they’re too busy making money to care (until they start losing it and it all gets frantic). I guess the porn world is basically the same as GM in that regard.
Sam.
It’s a tech thing for me. As astonishing as it may sound to you wonderfully keen tech types, tech stuff bores me cross-eyed.
My woefully low-tech writing space over at LJ doesn’t even count as a “blog”….still, I manage to pull anywhere from 1500 to 1800 hits a day, on average. That puts me close to the top 500 in TTLB. Not bad for no bells, whistles, boob pics or cumshots.
I listed at Technorati ages ago and yes, Sam darling, I will consider myself spanked concerning tags, which I will resume using—assuming Technorati will register them, of course.
What irks me about Technorati lately is that so many big blogs are including “sex” in their descriptions and pushing us real sexblogs lower down the list. Bah!
And when the hell is someone going to devise a thingy to weed out dead blogs and track only blogs that are current and updated regularly, like MINE? Technorati lists blogs that are “last updated 203 days ago.” Sounds like an ex-blog to me. A blog that has gone to meet its maker.
Just ranting away here. Hehe.
DTG xxoo
Woo! The sex tag is me – I tag every entry with technorati.
^_^
However, I don’t really understand fleshbot.
Coincidentally, I was just looking at who uses the tag “cockblogging” and noticed there was only Avatar and I using it – frankly that shocks me; because I know there are at least a few other blogs that participate in cockblogging Wednesday. But I digress.
In conclusion, thank you Sam, for bringing me to Bloggasm!
Also, thanks so much for all the tips you bring us in your blog.
Interestingly, the actual tag “sexblog” is woefully under-used. I have my blog itself tagged on technorati but I don’t tag posts. I find the idea of it sort of over-whelming everytime I consider starting. Like any classification system, tags are frustrating to work with. Why aren’t there wild cards built into all of the tagging based sites? I hate the idea of having to list “podcast, podcasts, podcasting, etc” for each keyword on every post.
PussyTalk – you’re right. My point isn’t so much to use tags internally, as to make sure you’re using them externally (many blogging systems present categories as tags by default).
As for the flaws of Technorati et-al, I had more to say on that here: http://sugarbank.com/2005/08/10/improving-google-jason-calacanis-and-the-worlds-best-blogs/
Shay – no thanks required (unless you have any really spicy ideas in which case have at it).
Ellie – tagging’s pretty easy (outside the blogger ghetto anyway). Wordpress (which I know you use) lists all categories as tags automatically. As for tagging plugins there are plenty to choose from. Tags are just glorified categories – the key is they’re blog specific.
I started really tagging posts just shortly before I launched the badass blog (yes, i do have other, more safe for work, blogs). I’ve found that a good deal of traffic does come in from tag searches, although it’s very erratic. Some days there’ll be a ton of tag searches in my stats, other days, not so much.
An interesting note: while checking my links in on technorati, I noticed that the treehugger site (eco-design) has a much higher technorati ranking than fleshbot. Huh? are there really more eco-freaks than porn surfers? Then I compared the two sites on alexa’s site profile to find that fleshbot has about 3 times the actual traffic that treehugger does…
Not quite sure what to make of that? I guess it makes some sense that more people might link to sites that are safe for work, etc. I’m sure there’s a lesson in it about the effectiveness of tagging and blogging about sex (maybe that readers are still depending more on static websites for porn?) but I’m not sure what.
BTW: Sam, what do you use to generate the tag cloud on your blog? Is it adaptable to TypePad, or is it a wordpress thing? I don’t mind hand-tagging posts, but it’d be easier to set up an automated thing.
Interesting analysis, Sam. I think the dearth of sex blogs has something to do with the intensely personal and culturally controversial nature of sex. I’ve seen many personal sex blogs come and go (heh) — people just have difficulty keeping it up (heh again). Some worry about being outed; others, especially photo-oriented bloggers, worry about various anti-smut regulations.
The big boys (Coolio’s etc.) are clearly in it for the money and they have the resources to avoid the potential prosecution (really, persecution) that gives amateurs pause. They have their own networks in place, their own business practices, and little interest in pushing the limits of the medium. It’s more about mutual backscratching than anything else.
For the pro-blogs like Fleshbot there’s a power law distribution at work here. When you’re linked by a dozen or so high-traffic websites, when you get ink in major media outlets, when google alone ushers 50,000 unique users to your servers every day, you stop worrying about 100 joe schmoes who may send, at best, a couple dozen hits each. Let’s face it — Inbound links are a piss-poor proxy for traffic anyway. So, increasingly, sex bloggers are invisible on blogs like Fleshbot (which is nonetheless kind of odd because Gawker still links random bloggers on a daily basis).
Personally, I have to give tags mixed reviews. Yeah, I get a trickle of traffic from technorati but it’s a rounding error compared to even my google traffic alone. The chief benefit for me is that tags allow ad-hoc navigation of my content.
BA – the tag cloud is a product of Ultimate Tag Warrior. As for the Fleshbot situation, all I’ll say is that Alexa rankings aren’t very accurate. At all. E.g. – a large proportion of SugarBank readers use Macs according to my browser stats, and try and find a Mac user with the Alexa toolbar.
My point’s not so much that tags are good, it’s that sex-blogging’s still under-explored (when it should logically be utterly saturated). There’s still a lot of room to play.
Lex,
I think my initial post was missing an important facet of my view. I don’t see tags as magic traffic generators, more as an indication that real blogs (i.e. sites that have RSS and date order at their core) are thin on the ground in the sex world. Tags are really just a useful metric.
I think tagging’s here to stay and that in a few years, the difference between a website and a blog will wither be very clear, or almost invisible if websites which aren’t blogs get hard to find.
I could have built my analysis on RSS data but it’s easy to find site with RSS that aren’t really blogs, or date ordered sites without RSS.
I’ll admit I’m utterly confused by tags. To further expose my non-understanding: If Wordpress does categories and tags automatically then why don’t I have little tags at the bottom of my posts? Also, I use Ping-o-Matic after I make a new post-is that a form of tagging?
Vixen – you are a little confused but:
1) Wordpress does categories – not tags.
2) Wordpress submits each post to Technorati using its categories as tags (so in that way Wordpress does tag, you just can’t choose what those tags will be past your categories)
3) Wordpress submits to ping-o-matic automatically. There’s no need to do it yourself (you can see this in the admin section ‘Options > Writing’ unless you’ve told it not to).
Thanks Sam for explaining things. So with Word Press I automatically ping then. But for putting tag words on an entry (like this one had “Tags: blog, marketing, tags, Technorati”) I should go to Technorati and do it by hand?
Vixen,
For a really good overview of the how and why of tags check out this article at performancing:
http://performancing.com/node/370
download The pdf file linked in the article. It’s quick, painless, and should answer some questions for you.
Actually, all of you who like Sam’s posts on marketing and the biz side of blogs might enjoy the content over there. I’ve been been finding some pretty consistently interesting and useful info there since I subscribed to their feed.
Thaks BA. Good tip.
Now, there’s a phenomenon of how tags often are used that might skew things. If I have a mainstream non-adult blog, and I make one post that relates to sex, I might use “sex” as a tag for it. But if I have a blog that’s about nothing BUT sex, am I going to tag every post as “sex” or “erotica” or “porn”? I don’t, because it would look a little dumb in my list of tags under the post itself, if it were there for every post. Rather, I use tags for indicating what sub-category that post might fall into. “positions”, “latex”, “japanese” or something. But when those end up on Technorati, it might not be obvious that I’m “of course” talking about Japanese sex customs, or sex positions, or latex fetishes.
So, there are somewhat conflicting purposes between the usefulness of tags for my own internal categorization, and the use of tags (in technorati) for attracting traffic and helping people find me. If I only were after the self-promotion, I could just say “sex”, “erotica”, “porn”, “nude”, etc as tags for every post. The sex blogs that do that, that I’ve noticed, seem to mostly be the very commercial, more or less fake blogs, which merely are some company’s attempt of capitalizing on the blog format. Whereas what I’d consider a more real blog would be where some people actually have something to say.
Stanley,
Excellent point. I’ve had this conversation recently with a couple of people. I use tags here internally (else everything would be tagged ‘porn’).
One thing you can do to get around that is use internal tags which are public and a different set of tags externally (I’ve been doing that since I started blogging with Technorati for instance).
You’re right – tagging for search makes for an ugly blog.
Sam,
Can you explain the difference between external/internal tagging? How do you setup and use the internal ones?
One thing that’s getting me is that I’d love to convert Sacredwhore to Wordpress and bring tagging to Sexerati, but to do so would change the architecture of how my posts are archived and thus permalinked across the web. Any ideas?
Melissa, an internal tag is one designed to help people around your blog, an external tag is one designed to help someone find your blog.
If you move to WP you can ad tags without restructuring your posts at all – they’re metadata. Maybe I should blog on this…
BA-excellent link. Thanks, I think I’ll learn a lot of things from that site.
Sam,
I’d love more info on how to set up internal/external tags. Seconding the post idea…
As a sex blogger I wasn’t surprised by your findings at all. When I started to tinker with Technorati tags I found out that hardly any of the bigger sex bloggers take advantage of some features that Technorati offers (such as adding keywords to your blog to make it easier for people to find through Technorati searches). I have started adding a few tags to some of my posts, and it does generate a handful new visitors (especially when the post is fresh). I have found that the keywords really make a difference though, at least for me. My blog isn’t even close to one of the larger sex blogs, and I’m not particularily concerned about traffic (that isn’t the reason I blog) but it is still nice for people to be able to find you if your blog is what they are looking for.
I will have to keep your Bloggasm thing in mind next time I write something especially hot or insightful
Take Care
Temptation,
I don’t think tags are the ultimate answer but I do think they show how much desire there is for sex in blogs, and how poorly it’s been served.
We shall over-cum (sorry – I couldn’t help myself)
I am so disappointed in my blog and just want to press that orange botton in my dashboard and deleted it. How do other blogs with no galleries have 200 visitors online or 20,000 views a day, Plus all the blogs just link to each other and I am sick of doing it too. Wanted to have a blog like glamour or bad girls blog they got no freaking tags and I can even find bad girls blog post on Google, so I just want to know is there any web site tells you how to make it
Ripper,
First thing – you’re using blogger to blog. It’s one reason other people might not take you seriously.
Secondly – those links between blogs (networking) mean a lot. They exist to move traffic and start when a blog proves to have consistantly worthwhile content.
I’ll write more about moving traffic soon, keep reading and think about making a move towards a more professional blogging system. It’ll help.
I can understand how Ripper feels about links. I originally had two blogs linked on my site – SugarBank and CodeRonin (ie. my mentor and my lover). After a couple of weeks, though, I started being pressured by friends and directories to put them on my links list.
Sam has trancended the whole links list by starting Bloggasm… I guess Ripper just has to find his own way too.