What are people looking for online: forums, blogs, or reviews?
May 16th, 2008Over the past few years there has been much buzz about blogs and how they’re revolutionizing the way we find and share information and news online. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard about the ‘blogosphere’ from television news coverage of the current presidential primaries - apparently it must be very important. I certainly read (and write!) blogs myself but do average Americans really care? Are they looking for interesting blogs to read about their favorite subjects?
A quick search of the Google Traffic Estimator seems to say no, at least compared to other keyword queries. Searches for blog-related web sites seems to be on par with searches for forums (you know, message boards) and forums have been around since the early days of the internet - heck, I even used to lurk on a few back in the days of the Prodigy dial-up service. But how does the popularity of searches for blogs and forums compare to searches for reviews?
It turns out the search volume for review related web sites and information is roughly 3 times the volume of searches for blogs or forums. So why aren’t we hearing about the online “review space” on the nightly news? Review aggregation is, after all, a service that would not exist without the internet and something that has the power to bring transparency and change to all sorts of industries. We also know more and more folks are turning to the Internet to read reviews before making purchase decisions.
In fact part of the reason review sites aren’t as common is that blogs and forums are much easier to create and configure since their software is readily available. Review App was created to make building and deploying consumer review websites as easy as launching a blog (and back in 2006 there were 50 million of them!) or managing an online forum. People are looking for reviews online - let Review App help you supply them!
