TechMeme: It's Not the Size of the Audience...

This isn't a discussion that will necessarily have a neat conclusion – that's sort of the nature of debate. But A-list bloggers dogpiled on the value, or lack there of, of headlining on TechMeme, and branched out to a more robust discussion about the value of quality (lesser, niche) traffic over the pounding servers get when headlining elsewhere.

The Diggs, Slashdots and BoingBoings of the world send a deluge that quickly washes away, to nutshell the argument, but niche-followers are loyal. On the other hand, what good is a handful of cheerleaders?

Well, that may depend on your motivation for publishing in the first place.

The discussion begins at Leaderboard, which shows the top 100 online publications appearing on the site. Johnson noted that TechMeme didn't generate near the traffic of the aforementioned buzz-networks, among others.

He writes:

But for the people who jostle for position on the site's top 100, what's the use of being part of an aggregator that aggregates but doesn't send readers your way?

And so begins the discussion as to whether TechMeme is worth its hype among the A-listers.

I don’t want a big audience. I want a smart audience. So far I’ve gotten exactly that from TechMeme.

Christopher Coulter, who, according to a quick

Well, that would be the cynic's viewpoint. Whether or not bigger is better (and that's a debate that can go on – crassly – all night), said echo-chamber extended beyond TechMeme as reports of similar trickle-down-traffic experiences came to light.

TechWag:

We have been on techmeme twice now, and it has driven less than 1% of all traffic to the web site. We may be user generated content web 2.0 heaven, but we are still increasingly reliant on web 1.0 search engines, and the very few top social networking sites. The top referrers to the web site, Google, yahoo, msn, live, and direct, long before we get to Digg, Slashdot, or other sites that tend to send spiky traffic.