An interesting collection of data I've gathered, starting on 29 May around noon until today, looking only at the top 4 slots on the page so it includes only featured bloggers.



There are a few holes in the data, mostly from blogs using the same post title repeatedly. That's annoying, for many reasons.

But I thought the info was interesting. Explains why it feels like you're always seeing the same people's posts pop up. Because you are.

ETA: Specific dupe blog post titles are: Deals We Like $69 JetBlue Fare Sale
Deals We Like A Few New Amex Statement Credit Offers
Deals We Like Currently Active Deals!
Deals We Like Frontier Airlines $29 Sale!
Deals We Like Up to 60,000 Delta Miles! Great Bonus for the Delta Amex Credit Cards!
Deals We Like Weekly Recap of Deals and Promotions
Road Warriorette Road Warriorette Weekend Express

Very interesting
Yes this does verify what I have always thought. sort of like the 80/20 rule in sales. 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.

I thought it seemed like Elliott was popping up a lot. That had to be the most useless addition to BA. While there are of course travel related issues and cases, there's an awful lot of posts completely unrelated to frequent flyer interests.

And, besides, Elliott's travel related posts frequently feature naivete and ignorance that's more shocking than useful or otherwise instructive.

The surprising thing to me is that the two highest frequency posters also have among the highest batting averages when it comes to "quality" posts -- or that's my subjective opinion, anyway.

I think BA should force Deals We Like to change the name of the blog. When it first joined I had the impression it was owned by BA and it was BoardingArea posting deals the bloggers liked (deals that had been featured on BA blogs). I guess this is partly true in that the blog doesn't have original content.

Goodness, and I thought I had posted at least once in that period!
Oh that's right, only the titans get Featured status! Weird how a blog can post once and yet get in to the Top 4 slots!

The DLD podcast explicitly set up to only post every other week (with the occasional special episode). The infrequency of posts is one of the reason it is a featured blog.

And there is at least one featured blog with zero posts in the data set.

You seem to have featured status today!

Afraid not - only the first four spaces are 'featured' (the two on row 1, and the first two on row 2). The last space on row 2 is a free for all, and doesn't count in Seth's survey.

The non-VIP bloggers get put on the 'featured' rotation once per year.

157 and 137 posts in 22 days!?

7 and 6 posts per day every day?

And that's just in the featured spots! (or are those two's posts always put in a featured spot?)

Wow.

A new post from a featured blogger starts (in theory) in spot 1. It gets bumped down as others post. If two new posts come into the system between refreshes then it is possible a post can start in slot 2 or 3 or such. My rough guess is that a post missing the #1 slot happens about 30% of the time, maybe a bit more. A post misses 1 & 2 about 10% of the time, starting in slot 3 on the site.

I only counted the posts which appear in slots 1-4 for a variety of reasons.

No wonder the pageview stats on BArea are garbled OMaaT and VFTW also get a better percentage on ad revenue from the HOM so the inflationary posting is also having other effects...

Still not convinced those guys would not be better off independent. How many people actively visit Gary's home page to see what is new, triggering ad requests, vs visiting the BA home page and seeing on there what he is writing?

This is offset, of course, by visits from BA viewers who are not regular Gary readers plus any improvement in ad pricing he gets via BA compared to a combo of Adsense and direct selling.

BArea gets better ad revenue per pageview by bundling all the blogs together. If Gary and Lucky went alone they would be as well off per page view. Assuming they would have the running/operation of the backend running as well/inexpensively as it is now. OTOH, BArea probably gives these two a better cut of the revenue because they theoretically could go alone.

That's not really true, I know the CPM on my blog for example is at least double that of what people on the BA platform receive (and my total traffic is a lot less). OMAT & VFTW might be getting a larger slice of the pie, but I doubt it's double what others are receiving. Bundling display ads isn't as lucrative as it once was.

I don't think these stats are really that surprising, those working at this full time are posting more than those who post part time.