Olive is right, there’s no way for a blogger to beat the Main Stream Media’s reach, without first joining it (or being promoted by it). There are even bloggers such as Steyn who have adapted their marketing quite well as to exploit the reach the Web has, to gain new followers who may have been unfamiliar with him prior to seeing his blog promoted by other conservative bloggers.
On amusing comment Olive got was that the commenter figured he’d never heard of Small Dead Animals. Actually, Olive mentioned that some blogs have large readerships, but that its an exception. It’s also worth pointing out that Kate has admitted that her blog is a sort of aggregator, where her readers send her story tips and she’s basically the editor of the online paper. Her blog is also frequently promoted by John Gormley and Charles Adler, both main stream media pundits with provincial and national audiences.
When bloggers do become successful, it’s common for MSM reporters to subscribe to them, and even invite the bloggers onto TV or radio programs as guest experts. It’s nearly impossible for a blogger to remain truly independent, and gain a large following, let alone a following as huge as a national TV audience. And even if blogging is their full time job (and it rarely is, because bloggers had lives before they blogged), then it’s impossible to have as much interesting content as the MSM can provide. That’s why aggregation of content is essential for bloggers to maintain a following. Syndicate, and you’ll have more eyes looking at your work.
I learned to, or instinctively decided to, join blog aggregators in 2004.
Progressive Bloggers and SaskBlogs are two of the ones I’m proudly listed on.
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Hat tip to 264MHz
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If a blogger blogs in the forest, and no one reads him, does he have a connection?
If an email box is spammed, and no one checks it, does anyone care? (Yes, an email administrator will have to deal with an email account that is using its quota.)
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff Archives 2006-2009 
mainstream is shurely own word
i get the neeed to have it as MSM, as MM just won’t be as groovy, but shurely Mainstream
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I’m wondering if the “reach” of a blog can be truly estimated. There must be tons of people such as myself who enjoy reading blogs but aren’t registered followers. I know some blogs have sitemeters, but aside from that, how does a blogger really know how many people read his/her posts?
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At the bottom of my page, feedburner tries to guess how many people came to my blog through RSS, or read my feed, which right now is about 41, or 10 more than this time last year probably. Many blogs have hundreds or thousands where mine says 41, and I’m not a “small” blog in many respects. I’ve had more than a quarter million visitors in the last few years, usually people who don’t look at a second page, but there is a core of at least 100 blog readers/commenters out there who know my blog well, and during certain times I’ll get 75 returning visitors in a day, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but compared to average blogs I’m proud of the stats. I’ve posted a little infrequently over the last few months, and it’s allowed my rankings to slip enough for me to fall out of the top 25 political blogs in Canada since Robert J. started tracking them.
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Shirley, you kid!
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