CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB JOBS
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- VIDEO
- AMAZON
- ALL TOPICS
CONTRIBUTORS
Why They Write About Apple
One of the conversations I often have with CN readers and with people at events is why blogs cover certain topics or companies more than others. If we look at big companies, one of the most popular companies (if not the most popular) is Apple. Why do so many tech blogs write about Apple so often compared to say Microsoft or Sun?
Sure a lot of it has to do with Apple’s innovative products but that’s not the reason. One part of the reason is that bloggers appear to skew higher on income than non-bloggers which affords for Apple purchases and naturally it makes sense for them to write about the products they own and love.
But the real reason is that there is no other company that can drive massive pageviews like Apple can. Since we (sadly) still live in a pageview economy where most bloggers are rewarded on the traffic they can drive to their stories, Apple wins over all others in a landslide. Even so-called personal (non-commercial) bloggers are still interested in the traffic spikes.
Why is this? Why does a story about an Apple product or a post about Apple CEO Steve Jobs drive more pageviews relative to stories about their competitors or other technology companies?
If I write a story about Twitter and note that some feature they just launched is crap, I will get some comments either agreeing or disagreeing. But overall it would be hard to fire anyone up around the discussion of a Twitter feature. And we could easily replace Twitter with nearly any other technology company and receive the same reply.
When one writes about Apple, it nearly always appears to the reader that they are either a massive fanboy or a massive hater. There appears to be no middle ground when discussing Apple and their products. Even simple news reporting comes across in one of the two mentioned camps. Our research shows that most bloggers skew towards massive fanboy which helps drive pageviews even further. When the blogger posts his or her Apple story, it’s like an alarm goes off across the Web. If the story is deemed as a fanboy story, the haters swarm and leave comments regarding the author’s fanboy status. Naturally after the haters swarm, the fanboys must counter-attack the haters in the comments. This leads to even more pageviews because comments are where the pageviews multiply. Each comment leads to at least one additional pageview and typically the commenter will return multiple times to the blog post to see if anyone has replied to him or her. This “pageview compounding” is what makes Apple so wonderful to write about.
In the old days, Apple stories were also a quick-frontpage for some of the larger blogs on social services like Digg. I haven’t been to Digg lately so I am not sure if this still holds true, but overall Apple stories are still great for pumping traffic through the social services. Apple posts also get indexed by the Apple aggregators which I’ve found also send a nice amount of traffic.
Now you know the real reason why there were so many stories about the Apple antenna issue with the iPhone 4 and why bloggers are hoping for similar issues with Apple products in the future. Or maybe it’s just that Apple has superior products?
Down with the lowly iHaters who are merely suffering from Apple envy. Almost no company except Amazon wanted to build a tablet that a consumer would use. As soon as Apple’s iPad became a success, all those copycat companies mustered up their gonads and swore they would “kill off” the iPad with their own wonder devices. Now all the Windows netbook loving fanboys think that every crappy Windows 7 tablet will destroy the iPad. Same with all those Android fanboys that think a few extra ports on an Android tablet will make it better than the iPad. Apple takes risks, other companies just ride Apple’s coattails.
Since the beginning, Apple was rooted as a “social movement” their products are just the brushes Steve Jobs paints with. Apple & Steve has had more influence on world society than any company in over 200 years. From the first PC to the World Wide Web, to iPods, iPads and iPhones, they create the products who change things for everyone else.
Steve believes you can put “culture” into products, and so far, he is correct. They change things, they bring down establishments like printing, broadcasting, music, telecommunications, etc. Apple is the tip of the spear for social, economic and moral change, that’s why everyone is so interested.
you missed a reason, techmeme will link to them if they write apple pieces :p
I used to really enjoy techmeme but its just turned into a apple fest recently, if only they had a filter…
Well you should have wrote about the Augen GenTouch78 tablet this past week. That would have generated some pageviews for ya! :) Seriously, Apple is something people either just love to hate or hate to love or so fanboy’d out, that anything they sniff up in their RSS reader that says Apple has massive amounts of drool time.
Don’t worry about it, keep doing what you do here at CN, your fans will keep reading. :)
The bigger issue with bloggers writing about Apple is that you will never (or nearly never) see a balanced post. Since they are fanboys/girls, they will always let apple slide and/or boast about any new feature. Other companies don’t get the free pass.
Apple FANBOY!! :-P