Natural Size of Weblog Audience May Be Around 150 People
Steve Mallett wrote another provocative article for O'Reilly Network called Community <= 150. In it, he draws upon information in Malcolm Gladwell's
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and
Emergence by Steven Johnson to suggest that the natural size of a weblog's audience may be as small as 150 readers:
I've found that bloggers are outpacing slashdot for innovative topics and conversation and I don't think it's the blogging mechanisms that achieve that as much as the natural selection of bloggers they connect with. The number of blogs that I read hovers around 150. Beyond that many start to contain the same voice as others and/or are equal replacements for ones in my list already and so don't add any value....
Consider another phenomenom we've all experienced. You join a community, whether it's an email list, website or other and it gains some popularity and so the members in the community grows into an unmanagable size. When I say manageable, I mean self-managing. And so you leave or become frustated and you lament the 'good ole days' of what your community was.