Aggregators and Blog Popularity

The increasing popularity of blog aggregator services such as Google Reader is likely to change which blogs are the most popular.

Consider a simple example:

Imagine you have a choice of reading:

(1) five blogs that each post 20 times a week.
(2) one hundred blogs that each post one time a week.

Further assume that the quality of the posts in (1) are slightly lower than that in (2)

Before blog aggregators most people would prefer (1) because of the cost of going to each blog. But with aggregators the time cost of reading blogs is the same with (1) and (2).

Without aggregators , the successful bloggers were those who had many good posts each day. With aggregators , bloggers who have a few great posts a month should get more subscribers than those who post more frequently but with lower quality.