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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Which is more important: Quality or Quantity? In the realm of blogging, I believe that neither quality nor quantity are completely dominant factors. In order to satisfy the reader, a healthy balance is needed. An extreme weighting towards quality or quantity, while sacrificing the other in equivalent fashion, would seem to dissatisfy the audience. Suppose that this is the case; what kind of numbers is the reader looking for? In retrospect, one blog a day is probably a bit too much. Even five blogs a week proved to be on the high side, as frequency was maintained at the price of quality. My writing style became noticeably more convoluted, my sentences more verbose. Long time habits took over, and conscious editing efforts for the audience took a back seat. The stated purpose was quantity, and it came with a price. If there can be too many articles, then at what point does it similarly become too little? If we can write too many articles that quality suffers and the reader becomes uninterested, then at what point does the reader lose interest because of the scarcity of articles [1]? What if we wrote just one article a year? Unless we're already celebrities in our own right, we're not likely to maintain readership. What if we wrote once a month? We're getting closer, and it's certainly not impossible, but we'd likely be demanded of mind-blowing quality, whether it be entertainment, creativity, or insight, to interest potential readers [2]. What if we wrote once a week? For most of us, this is "in the ballpark" of where we want and need to be. Great writing isn't mandatory; even just good writing is more than acceptable, provided that our style and content matches what our readers are looking for. My current theory is that for most of us who are not super famous or super talented already, somewhere between one to three articles a week gives us the mind share of our audience [3] and the attentiveness we need to create useful prose and improve upon it. So for me, it's time to reevaluate. Now that I have proven to myself that I can attain frequency, it seems appropriate for to sacrifice some of it in order to strive for less superficial compositions [4]. Like so many of our pursuits, balance is a key ingredient to our progress.
[1] This primarily concerns the independent blog; if there are multiple contributors or if the reader subscribes to an aggregated list of bloggers, then the supply problem is almost completely mitigated. Quality reigns supreme. [2] RSS readers surely help us out in this regard though. In the days of bookmarks, we'd likely be given a cold shoulder here. [3] Readership may seem superficial and vain in all of this, but it is critical in keeping our motivation. [4] Only giving myself 30 - 60 minutes in the morning to create an article proved to be creatively limiting.
Crossposted from my main blog
 
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It depends how many ideas and how much you have to say as to how often you can write a blog. The appetite online for content of all kinds is limitless, so the only real limiting factor is how much interesting writing can you produce.
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I'll use Youtube Hero's as an example.
XboxAhoy releases ~1 video per 2/3weeks. He has 200K subscribers.
Woodysgamertag releases ~1 video per day. He has 650K subscribers.
And
Seananners releases ~2/3 videos per week. He has 1.05M subscribers.
From this comparison quantity has a higher weight than quality. I would say 60/40 ratio would be optimum.
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If you were to think of quality and quantity as the axes of a graph, since I think we can reasonably conclude that blogging doesn't benefit from economies of scale, the productivity frontier would probably appear concave to the origin, supporting your belief that optimal production lies somewhere between the two extremes. That point is going to vary for each person (think Shaq's twitter vs. Thomas Friedman's column), but once a week seems like a good point to start experimenting from.
The other thing to consider is that with suboptimal efficiency, you aren't actually producing on the productivity frontier, so it may be possible to improve quantity and quality simultaneously by improving efficiency.
I really enjoy reading your blog posts, btw. I haven't had much time to play SC2 lately but still hang around TL to read 1) your posts and 2) my guilty pleasure, college admissions/job search blogs.
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United States1052 Posts
I think a sparse (2-3 things per week) schedule is the best for most online media. Personally, as a person who reads these things, 2-3 blogs/comics/videos per week from someone is good because, since I browse several comics/blogs/channels, it's good to have a digestable amount of stuff to go through. If everyone releases content every single day every week, it becomes way way too hard to digest it all. That's personally why I don't follow HD and Husky, and even Day9 as much any more, because I don't have the time and attention span to follow all their videos all the time.
So yeah, I think a good deal of it has to do with how much your readers can handle.
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Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact.
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On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact.
True, but the more you do something the better you become at it.
The advice given to script writers, novelists, writers in general is usually, write as much as possible. Even if it's unpublishable crap, the more you do, the better you will become because you will learn from your mistakes, learn what works for you etc.
If someone writes 100 short stories in a year... the chances of 1 of them being really good is higher than someone who only writes 2. (Short of the person doing 2 being a savant of some kind. )
Quantity can produce quality, if the writer consciously pays attention to things they can improve on.
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On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact.
Then why is Budweiser the biggest beer in the world? Stuff is pure trash. So, in one simple instance, it's not a fact, so, you're objectively wrong.
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On April 24 2012 04:58 Quesadilla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact. Then why is Budweiser the biggest beer in the world? Stuff is pure trash. So, in one simple instance, it's not a fact, so, you're objectively wrong.
But your perception of Budweiser is purely subjective and thus you are objectively wrong.
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On April 24 2012 04:58 Quesadilla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact. Then why is Budweiser the biggest beer in the world? Stuff is pure trash. So, in one simple instance, it's not a fact, so, you're objectively wrong.
It's a product so price becomes a factor too. Taking into account your average beer drinker: Quantity > Quality by a large margin.
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I think consistency is what trumps quality/quantity. There are people that survive on either extreme, but for someone trying to establish themselves, consistency is that'll lead to stable growth.
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East Gorteau22261 Posts
If you ask me, quantity is a sort of quality.
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On April 24 2012 04:58 Quesadilla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact. Then why is Budweiser the biggest beer in the world? Stuff is pure trash. So, in one simple instance, it's not a fact, so, you're objectively wrong.
Since when was Budweiser the biggest? o_O
News to me and EG anyone? They put and plug their shit everywhere just like Budweiser, but that doesn't make me want to take a sip out of their Cola.
They're all about the promo and not much else.
I am all for quality over quantity, but if you don't keep yourself in the loop then you won't stay relevant regardless of your quality.
On April 24 2012 06:01 Skuller wrote:
I think consistency is what trumps quality/quantity. There are people that survive on either extreme, but for someone trying to establish themselves, consistency is that'll lead to stable growth.
Consistency goes along way in branding. Indeed.
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I'm about to blow your mind here:
Quality can come from picking the best out of quantity. Especially in artistic pursuits, you can't create a great piece just by working on it for a long time. Sometimes there is nothing great about what you've worked on no matter how much more time you devote to it.
My advice would be to write a bunch and then pick the best out of the lot and improve it with conscious editing. I don't want to make a serious judgement, but I noticed that with your frequent blogging you often took to cliche ideas (including this one, really lol). That's a symptom of writing often, but not a reason to avoid writing often. You have to get through the cliches to find what's meaningful. When you find that, that's what you share.
Hope this helps. The big thing is that you don't have to post every single thing you write.
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I feel that by and large, quality earns you fame/reputation/etc., and quantity earns you viewers/money/etc.
Einstein only needed one theory to put himself in the history books for all time.
Maintaining a balance between quality and quantity is vital to be successful, as well as consistency.
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On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact.
It's also a fact that if you're given the option of a shitty burger every day three times or the best filet mignon imaginable once a month youll actually starve to death if you pick "quality"
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
On April 24 2012 01:56 Melchior wrote:
If you were to think of quality and quantity as the axes of a graph, since I think we can reasonably conclude that blogging doesn't benefit from economies of scale, the productivity frontier would probably appear concave to the origin, supporting your belief that optimal production lies somewhere between the two extremes. That point is going to vary for each person (think Shaq's twitter vs. Thomas Friedman's column), but once a week seems like a good point to start experimenting from.
The other thing to consider is that with suboptimal efficiency, you aren't actually producing on the productivity frontier, so it may be possible to improve quantity and quality simultaneously by improving efficiency.
I really enjoy reading your blog posts, btw. I haven't had much time to play SC2 lately but still hang around TL to read 1) your posts and 2) my guilty pleasure, college admissions/job search blogs.
For the time being I plan on writing maybe 3-4 articles/week instead of 5/week. We'll see what happens 
On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact.
Even if this is true, the less we write, the higher the standard of quality that is demanded of us rises. If we wrote/created only once every five years, most of us wouldn't be able to live up to the standards expected from us by the audience :O
On April 24 2012 04:55 Gingerninja wrote:
True, but the more you do something the better you become at it.
The advice given to script writers, novelists, writers in general is usually, write as much as possible. Even if it's unpublishable crap, the more you do, the better you will become because you will learn from your mistakes, learn what works for you etc.
If someone writes 100 short stories in a year... the chances of 1 of them being really good is higher than someone who only writes 2. (Short of the person doing 2 being a savant of some kind. )
Quantity can produce quality, if the writer consciously pays attention to things they can improve on.
That's the conundrum!!
On April 24 2012 07:50 Chef wrote:
I'm about to blow your mind here:
Quality can come from picking the best out of quantity. Especially in artistic pursuits, you can't create a great piece just by working on it for a long time. Sometimes there is nothing great about what you've worked on no matter how much more time you devote to it.
My advice would be to write a bunch and then pick the best out of the lot and improve it with conscious editing.
And maybe this is the solution to the conundrum! 
I don't want to make a serious judgement, but I noticed that with your frequent blogging you often took to cliche ideas (including this one, really lol). That's a symptom of writing often, but not a reason to avoid writing often. You have to get through the cliches to find what's meaningful. When you find that, that's what you share.
Hope this helps. The big thing is that you don't have to post every single thing you write.
Well I was hoping to be just a little original in this tired little subject, but perhaps I've failed 
On April 24 2012 06:42 Zealously wrote:
If you ask me, quantity is a sort of quality.
deep...
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On April 24 2012 04:58 Quesadilla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2012 04:27 Southwards wrote:
Quality is always better then quantity. Its a fact. Then why is Budweiser the biggest beer in the world? Stuff is pure trash. So, in one simple instance, it's not a fact, so, you're objectively wrong.
The TRUE Budweiser is pretty good if you ask me...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser
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EPT
