Wine Blog Ratings?
I had the happy opportunity to give a talk to a gathering of Wine Australia yesterday in San Francisco. Wine Australia is the promotional arm of the Australian wine industry. You’ve heard of this industry, haven’t you? That’s right, it’s the industry that might be the most innovative technically and marketing-wise of any national wine industry on the globe.
They had me to their gathering of Australian wine marketers and executives to talk about the issue of blogs. I choose to talk about blogs as part of wine media, rather than the issue I think many of them have thought more about…"should I start a blog". The latter is a much more complicated issue than the former. Where blogs sit in the context of the global wine media is a much simpler, more straightforward issue. So sue me, I took the easy route.
I’ve been getting a number of such invitations of late. It’s a compliment. But let’s not stop there. It’s really indicative of a realization of those in the wine industry of the importance and significance of what’s happening with wine blogs.
I started my wine blog in November 2004. By my count there were about 50 to 75 wine blogs on the Internet at that moment in time. Today, by my best estimate, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 600-700 wine blogs on the Internet. What’s going on is something of a snowball effect.
-Blogs are easy to create
-People see other wine blogs and want to join in
-Wine Blogs start to get recognition
-That spurs more people to start wine blogs.
I don’t think we are going to see a slowdown in the number of wine blogs that are create. I think we are in the middle, rather than the end of the initial burst of wine blog creation. By this time next year I’d bet we see at least 1000 wine blogs on the Internet.
After yesterday’s talk someone I respect greatly came up to me and made a suggestion that was very very interesting, but if carried through would certainly piss off a number of bloggers who thought the act was presumptuous:
"Someone needs to start a rating system for wine blogs."
He he he he he….
"How would you rate them?"
"Who are you to say what’s good and what’s not?"
"What qualification to you have to do such a thing?"
"It’s just exclusionary!"
Indeed…to all of those things. However, let’s at least admit that wine bloggers who review wines consider all these issues then go right ahead and review wines.
The suggestion was made based on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to sift through all the wine blogs on the internet to determine which are worth pursuing and why. And this, of course is the exact same rationale for reviewing wines. The person who suggested a Wine Blog Rating System told me that last years American Wine Blog Awards were very helpful to them in ferreting through the vast array of choices, but it really didn’t scratch the surface. He’s right.
There is already a Blog Rating System out there, but the system is admitedley quantitative, not qualitative.
The idea of a Qualitative Blog Rating project does speak to me positively for reasons that are surely indicative of real personality flaw I carry with me that has something to do with ego. However, the time it would take boggles the mind. Nevertheless, I’ll say straight out that it’s a great idea.
The Wine Australia folks were just great. Very inquisitive and thoughtful when it came to the subject of blogs and where they fit into the realm of wine media. They, like others, are right now beginning to figure out how to deal with them and why to deal with them .
Hi Tom…You are right that a qualitative rating of wine blogs would be extremely subjective, and who’s to say what’s worth reading — or not. I believe the cream always, or almost always, rises to the top. So it seems to me the best wine blogs will develop the greatest following. If a wine marketing person were thinking about sending a wine sample to a blogger, wouldn’t he or she be foolish to overlook the size of the blogger’s audience, regardless of what a third party might think of the quality of the content?
You will pardon my rambling:
The process of measuring a blog’s audience is just on the cusp of being a real indicator that advertisers and sponsors can use. That can play into the hands of folks who decide what’s good and what isn’t.
But blogs are not just a popularity contest (or perhaps they are), and I agree that the cream rises to the top, eventually. But I will say that getting a mention from Fermentation is enough to give a baby Slashdot effect to the target blog, since people read and trust you, Tom. That being said, if someone plays nicely in the wine blogosphere, comments on other’s blogs and participates in the dialogue, while it may not be sufficient for building an audience, I do believe it’s necessary (for at least 99% of wine bloggers).
I think something that’s been overlooked is actively encouraging Diggs or del.icio.us links, and employing all the web 2.0 goodness that is already available out there. It can be a key factor in helping that cream rise to the top. Now, all that’s left is how best to get the blog-viewing public to become savvy with Digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Robert:
Indeed the cream will rise to the top. However, I’m not sure readership is necessarily the only way to determine the character of the cream.
Take wine for example. I guess the equivalent of “readership” would be sales. I’m not sure sales is the best indicator of quality.
But of course there is no price point involved in blog’s either, is there.
This is a tough one. There are so many different categories of wine blogs: personal diary-like ones, consumer-oriented ones, business-to-business and topical blogs…though there might be 600+ “wine” blogs there are so many sub-categories that comparing them becomes relatively impossible.
In print media, audit bureaus determine what the readership is of a particular publication, and then its up to media planners and advertising execs to factor in the subjective issues of a magazine’s target audience. Are they taste-makers? Early adopters? High income? Certain age demo? Same goes for broadcast media (and this is all in the effort to determine appropriate costs for advertising space/time).
Without specifics such as these, wouldn’t wine blog ratings purely be a popularity contest? Determining who is the “best” would also require determining who the best judges of that would be.
I guess what I’m saying is…what is the point of ratings at this stage? People start blogs and then stop posting all the time. There will be a natural (and high) rate of attrition. And as for audiences finding things, isn’t the beauty of the internet the ability to ferret things out on one’s own, to discover…and not to be told what matters?
I think Jill makes a good point. Let’s just enjoy the phenomenon and watch its growth. Eventually the “best” or “most important” or “most popular” will find their niche and their level doing whatever it is they set out to do in the first place. People blog about wine for all sorts of reasons and with as many differing slants as there are grains of sand at the beach. My hunch is most bloggers do it because it’s fun, with mo profit motive or serious ambition to win a trophy.
One more thing, to Tom’s point. A wine marketer sends a sample to a wine critic in hopes of reaching the critic’s audience with a positive review. If the blogger has little or no audience, and it is apparent nobody cares what he or she thinks, why would the marketer bother with that blogger when there are plenty of blogs out there that have verifiably huge followings? What am I missing?
“Without specifics such as these, wouldn’t wine blog ratings purely be a popularity contest?”
Yes…that’s correct..in a sense
Determining who is the “best” would also require determining who the best judges of that would be. I guess what I’m saying is…what is the point of ratings at this stage? People start blogs and then stop posting all the time. There will be a natural (and high) rate of attrition. And as for audiences finding things, isn’t the beauty of the internet the ability to ferret things out on one’s own, to discover…and not to be told what matters?
I’m not actually thinking of a panel or judges. I’m thinking of a simple blog review, just like there are wine reviewers.
“I think Jill makes a good point. Let’s just enjoy the phenomenon and watch its growth. Eventually the “best” or “most important” or “most popular” will find their niche and their level doing whatever it is they set out to do in the first place. People blog about wine for all sorts of reasons and with as many differing slants as there are grains of sand at the beach. My hunch is most bloggers do it because it’s fun, with mo profit motive or serious ambition to win a trophy.”
I see this point quite clearly. And it makes sense.
“One more thing, to Tom’s point. A wine marketer sends a sample to a wine critic in hopes of reaching the critic’s audience with a positive review. If the blogger has little or no audience, and it is apparent nobody cares what he or she thinks, why would the marketer bother with that blogger when there are plenty of blogs out there that have verifiably huge followings? What am I missing?”
I wasn’t thinking about this from a marketer’s perspective but rather from a reader’s perspective.
Wine drinkers read reviews of wines to get a sense of them. To see what others think. To see how a wine they’ve had has been received. They also read reviews of wine because they simply can’t get to them all and in many cases they’ve not even heard of most wines.
Rating wine blogs (or reviewing them in a formal way) would serve the same purpose. It’s also important to note that simply a blog does not have much of an audience that doesn’t mean it’s not very good or not worth reading. It just might mean that no one has stumbled upon it yet and helped expose it to the world.
Posted by: Robert Whitley | September 21, 2007 at 03:14 PM
Tom…Don’t you already sort of do that in a way? When you highlight a blogger or send your readers to look at someone’s posting, you are in essence doing a review in the sense that you’re making a recommendation. And it has your name on it, so there’s accountability. It’s not just anonymous praise that could be from a relative or best friend. Anyway, this is all good stuff. What’s important is that people are talking about wine and exchanging their views, developments that are great to see because it’s no longer just the wine geeks who are having a say. So keep those links flying to all those bloggers you know with great ideas and the ability to articulate them!
At one point in time there was a blog called “Small Business Blog of the Day”, written by Brian Brown – in which a business blog was reviewed, sometimes for better or worse. But the cool thing was that there was a lesson in each blog of the day – not only did you get to hear about a cool blog, but often you also learned something you could apply to your own blog and make it better.
Perhaps the same thing could be applied to wine-related blogs.
BTW, Brian took a few months away from blogging but (hopefully) he’s back now – here’s the link:
http://www.pajamamarket.com/
So how long before there is little difference between blogs and paid publications? Or subscription blogs?
This is an interesting post and I have a few reactions.
1. Wine blogs are no different than any category in terms of the increasing volume. However, I think you’ll find that most of them are abandoned within the first six months. Creating a blog is a whole lot easier than maintaining one.
2. So what if there are so many blogs? If you’re an A-list blog like Fermentation that just means more links promoting you. We should encourage inclusion and welcome new bloggers to the community, not create a caste system for blogs. That’s not what Web 2.0 is about.
3. If someone did create a Wine Blog rating system, 95% of the people who read your site wouldn’t give a $#!*. And bloggers who ended up on the outs could create their own fictitious organization with its own wine blog rating system to brand themselves as the “top rated wine blogs.” It’s divisive, it’s elitist, it’s just no good.
I agree with Jill – the blogs that are good will find their audience. Having some blog rating system may wind up being like the phone book: a great many disconnected numbers. Click on the blog and either get a 404 error, or see that the content hasn’t been updated in half a year, yet it appears high on the blog all star most best rating list you gotta try it because it got 90 points from the Blog Advocate.
Sorry to be annoying but to continue, as was already pointed out above, who is qualified to judge? Will we have judges who gravitate towards the “fuller, highly sensational, in-your-face” type of blog, or will there be judges who prefer the old world, subtle, conservative style of writing? Then with highly rated blogs, good luck even trying to view the pages because the server will be overloaded.
Actually, what monkuwino points out is already happening, like on the Alawines top 100 list or the localwineevernts.com list, for example – blogs that have a high rating but are either gone or have had no updates.
If someone wants to do the rating thing, great – but I suspect that any effort less than full time will be found wanting…
Tom:
Just my belated two cents on bloggers rating wines. I remember what Robert Whitley told me years ago when we were discussing the (in my opinion, declining) value of wine competitions: “without competitions, you have no alternative to the 100-point system.” I’ve entered my clients ever since.
As much as I detest the 100-point system, I’m the first to print a shelf talker when I get a good score, and I’d be happy to support another alternative…as long as the blogger who develops it also develops credibility at the same time.
Rusty
Rusty,
I”m with you and Robert Both. I’m particularly aggressive recommending competitions for clients that have tasting rooms as my experiences is that his is really where medals have a good ROI. It’s not cheap these days either to enter wines into competitions. It can add up.
The credibility of someone who sets out to devise a rating system for Blogs will develop some degree of credibility. Maybe very little. Maybe a lot. It would all depend on the kind of work they put into it and the integrity they show…no different from wine reviewers that rate wine.
People seem to be against this idea. But you know, we rate and review everything: movies, music, fine art, books, TV, performance art, restaurants. I’m having a difficult time finding a good reason why wine blogs shouldn’t fall under the same scrutiny.
Anyway….thanks for commenting.
Cheers…
Tom…
Okay – first we allowed Parker to tell us what wines to drink because we cannot trust our own palates. Now we need wine blog judges because we cannot trust our ability to choose what wine blog content is interesting or important to us?
Hello, I like what you have to say, Honest! Seems like we are in the same locale, funny we have not met.
I will read more of your articles, thanks! Mark