Revised version of “The role of reciprocation in social network formation, with an application to blogging”

Caterina and I wrote a thorough revision of our paper on the role of reciprocation in social network formation that was first released in March. It is available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1944314.

We re-organized the whole of the first part by cutting off some of it to make room for more discussion of the literature. We added many references and the whole reads better overall. The theoretical model was not changed, but we expanded the econometric section to discuss the long-term impact of sustained changes in a blogger’s activity.

Sustained increases in a blogger’s level of activity translate in higher audience, but the process is front-loaded in terms of costs. In short, blogger A who becomes more active will not at first get many more readers. In fact, A will start reading more blogs before they read A back. A’s audience thus increases, but only after a while.

The total effects of changes in activity settle only slowly over time and differ from the short-term effects. That is, a blogger will have to go through a period where she adds more blogs to her reading list than add her before this translates into a more than commensurate increase in her own audience.

We summarize our findings as follows:

1. Writing more entries will not make your blog more popular, but writing more comments on others’ blogs will.
2. Getting more features for your blog, if necessary by paying for them (horror!), will boost your readership.
3. Sustained effort will increase your audience, but don’t expect payoffs to come soon. In fact, you might have to read more blogs than read you for a long while before this pays off. Things will even out over the long-term though.
4. Adding others to your reading list will get others to add you to theirs. But only about 10% will, according to our estimates. We did not go into what to do about those who do not add you back.
5. Joining communities of like-minded bloggers is a good way to find new blogs to read. Yes, this may sound obvious, but think that through reciprocation, they might read you back! Hint, hint!
6. Successful bloggers tend to reciprocate readership more freely (though whether they read back those who read them… we have no way to know…). This could be a reason they are more popular, but we cannot prove this with our data.
7. LiveJournal bloggers in Russia were supposed to be more media-oriented while those in the US are more into social networking, but this did not translate into differences in our results however. The differences in culture between those two types of bloggers may have been overstated…
8. There is very strong persistence in term of readership, that is, people tend not to tire from reading blogs they are subscribed to (or at least, your readership will not decrease much over time on its own).

So all in all, from my 10+ years experience of blogging, the results certainly sound quite intuitive, but I am sure that it would have been easy to argue for results going the other way.  It is nice to have some robust results and a clearer idea of the properties of blogging.

I was surprised by how similar our results for Russian and US blogs were. Those are really two different cultures on LJ, with US being mostly teenagers and grad students, while in Russia, they are more like the standard WordPress user of the US, i.e. thematic blogs. I would like, in a further iteration of this research, to classify blogs by type so as to examine further differences in their dynamics.

Second, the low apparent rate of reciprocation, around 10 to 15%, was lower than I expected. Bloggers reciprocate only about 10 to 15% of the time and this does not seem to vary much from stages to stages in the life of a blog (i.e. how long they have been established). I wonder if we would find the same if we gathered data on the establishment and breakdown of links at the individual level. This is possible, but much more data intensive and having access to company data would be helpful so we know who started the relation.

For more details, the paper is available at SSRN and RePEc.

Workshop in Paris in June

I was very happy to be invited to present my research on “Reciprocity in blogging networks”, at the Workshop on “Digital Business Models: Understanding Strategies“, organized by EconomiX and the CREM in Paris on June 25 and 26. Not only was this an excellent opportunity to come to Paris, where I spent some of my best summers in my student days, but the program was also very interesting. I learned a lot about data gathering and analysis from the presentations about online advertising by Avi Goldfarb (which I discussed) and about demand in the hotel industry by Anindya Ghose.

I tried in my presentation to combine two papers on reciprocity in blogging networks. The first, published recently, relates unequal relations among bloggers with their productivity, and shows that those who are more productive tend also not to read back their readers’ blogs. The second, in progress, tries to compute how much of a blogger’s readership is gained through his activity vs. what is gained from establishing reciprocal reading relations with other bloggers. Presenting all this in 30 minutes turned out to be too ambitious, notably as my introduction to the topic was too lengthy. I will hopefully do better at the GSBC brown bag seminar on October 27th.