Which sells more: Sex or Ideas?
Answer: duh...both!
That's the conclusion Publishing 2.0 came to yesterday when they wrote about Nick Denton's latest attempt to incent writers to produce higher quality material for Gawker published blogs.
The 2.0 piece points out that there are two basic paths to take for driving blog traffic. First, fill the post with SEO goodies and rise up the search charts. Second, write stuff others find interesting enough to link to and write about. The purists amongst us shake our heads and tsk over the former while struggling mightily to succeed at the latter. We tend to want to view the world as an either/or place: either you're honest or you're not; either you're funny or serious; either sexy or smart.
But, we all know that this is wrong. We're all honest/not; funny/serious; sexy/smart. (OK, well, maybe all sexy is a stretch.)
What I want is a wide range of stuff to engage with. Some of it is salacious and idiotic. Some of it is serious and entertaining. Some of it is demanding and enlightening.
For me, the key questions are, "When do I read what? When not?"
There are times when only a little light idiocy will do; others when I need to know what's happening and can't waste a second on foolishness.
That's what makes the Web so captivating: no matter what I'm in the mood for, I'm almost always going to be able to find it here.
We're complex creatures living complex lives. It's good to see Gawker looking for ways to turn up the volume on the "serious" side of the equation but let's not get too carried away with our criticisms of the the heavy volume sites. 'Cause the last thing I'd want to see is for beauties like this baby to disappear (fat chance!).
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