PR Studies

Trendspotting

Growing markets encourage optimism, and lead to hype. We can all remember the dot com boom; a few years before that I recall the satisfaction of working with clients who were growing 20 per cent a year (regardless of my efforts).

This may be premature, but I've a hunch that weblogging may be moving beyond the 'irrational exuberance' phase. My (slight) evidence: visitors to this modest site dipped in May after showing strong growth in the first third of the year. There have been previous dips, but August and December are holiday times with fewer postings and fewer active readers.

There's stronger evidence of this trend from the much more popular Micro Persuasion site. Here, strong growth in visitors also stalled in May. I couldn't find publicly-available web stats on other PR weblogs. Can you confirm or confound my hunch?

Comments

Trendspotting

Growing markets encourage optimism, and lead to hype. We can all remember the dot com boom; a few years before that I recall the satisfaction of working with clients who were growing 20 per cent a year (regardless of my efforts).

This may be premature, but I've a hunch that weblogging may be moving beyond the 'irrational exuberance' phase. My (slight) evidence: visitors to this modest site dipped in May after showing strong growth in the first third of the year. There have been previous dips, but August and December are holiday times with fewer postings and fewer active readers.

There's stronger evidence of this trend from the much more popular Micro Persuasion site. Here, strong growth in visitors also stalled in May. I couldn't find publicly-available web stats on other PR weblogs. Can you confirm or confound my hunch?