Lists are overrated
- by Antonio Lupetti
- 21
- July 5, 2010
Let’s face it. Sometimes a nice list with “X” (where X is an integer between 5 and infinity) of the most interesting things you can find about a certain subject is what you feel you need for your readers.
For example: the 10 best applications for the iPhone, the 20 most interesting code snippets for WordPress, the 30 most popular plugins for jQuery, the 50 best sites to inspire all those web designers who fell victim of a pathological decrease of creativity.
This is a sort of widespread mania, typical of a huge number of bloggers, that behind the naive intention to suggest something interesting and useful to their readers, often hides the opportunistic side, of generating traffic to their site, preferably with little to no effort.
Because lists work. They generate traffic, a lot of it. They represent an investment with high return and low risk that sooner or later every blogger will consider.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing intrinsically bad in choosing the utilitarian side moving along the highway rather than the steep and rugged mountain path. I myself often used lists, use them now and will probably use them in the future, just like many others.
At the end of the day, every blog owner can understand that. The typical case is when, after hours of calculations spent in the vain attempt of finding an interesting topic for your next post, you are miserably forced to lean on the safe long list to reenforce the visits to your site which dramatically decreased since your last post, dating back to a couple of days before.
Just to be sure, a nice article with the “ten coolest fonts of the month” is always a hit destined to climb rapidly the top ten links of the day on Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Popurls and so on.
A list of the 10 most interesting cheat sheets is by no means to be underestimated either. But since hundreds of lists like that are already around – they’re almost all the same except for the order in which the links appear – you will have to make an effort to find at least 20, 40, 60 (and multiples) fonts or cheat sheets to be more attractive on the market and make your list really memorable.
This is a classic mechanism that triggers a vicious spiral of atrocities, designed to deliver a list made up of a disproportionate number of links on the topic of your choice. Eventually you will have something humongous, capable of competing with the Google index. And rest assured: it will undoubtedly be successful in terms of visits.
If you’re lucky, you’ll also have the pleasure of tasting the bitter glory generated by the appearance of your beautiful mega list on Digg’s homepage. I say “bitter” because if you’re not well equipped, after 30 seconds, your site will collapse, miserably overwhelmed by a horde of visitors per second comparable to your average daily balance.
And now, left on the table, a question: are those lists really useful in giving more value to a blog? To me, popularity and success of a blog are not measured only by the number of visits, but by the quality of content. That’s why I’d think twice.
What about you?
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Totally agreed! Do we want posts like: “774,3 Portfolio page tutorials with Neo Classistic striped headers”, “765+ tuts about creating a RSS dog” and “436 yellow with green dotted Flashy login forms”…
Please no more! Your quote: “popularity and success of a blog are not measured only by the number of visits, but by the quality of content” really hits the nail!
Couldn’t agree more mate! Great article.
I completely agree! I skip most of those articles these days purely based on their heading. Equally irritating: Smashing Magazine’s series on “Webdesign in {insert random country}”: I just don’t care that much for websites from Poland thank you very much..
Too bloody right, I am sick of list posts.
You’re right about
“you are miserably forced to lean on the safe long list to reenforce the visits to your site”
although I disagree with the word miserably.
I think many blog owners will quite happily churn out list after list after list to keep their traffic high, and I think it’s a sign that the site has moved from one that wants to provide quality content for readers into one that is more focused on its advertising revenue (assuming the site has ads) and has gotten lazy.
And when that happens the quality of content will inevitably suffer.
As an aside, I’ve had an idea for a while about a solution to the whole list post epidemic. It’s still very much at an early stage but I’ll (hopefully) be announcing it soon. Hopefully you and everyone who agrees with you, Antonio, will like it.
You just took my toughts and put them into words.
I don’t know why everyone is itchy about list articles. I don’t think they are bad, in fact I like them.
Ask me why.
It saves a lot of time.
Just an example- A client of mine asked me to design a ‘Retro style website’. The next thing I will be doing is to google for ‘Retro style websites’. Obviously, what we will be getting is a number of list posts on the same, not actually the list of retro style websites. But those posts will really help me to get some inspiration very quickly.
Everyone says that they hate it. Still they all use it. It’s not me, the numbers talk. Just have a look at any design blog who has 10k+ subscribers, their most popular/most visited posts are lists. If people hate it, why would they visit it?
I agree to your point on the content quality though. Keep posting listcles is bad for any blog – unless the blog is meant to be one of that kind. There should be a balance in the number of listcles and other posts. Smashing Magazine is the best example – I say.
Brilliant points made – there is definitely a use for them, despite people apparently growing tired of the list style.
Nice and slice. A lot of doze list aren’t that good for real because you also find freuquently the same things in list by list and make the user strugle to find usufull and really helfull resource.
Like 10 best blogs of tech, and the 10 firts list have the same pages. 100 wordpress themes have the same fault. Well but just as you say we will never stop llock around for list, and I will never stop use Internet no matter they ask me if my ayes are square.
Thank you for the post
Personally, as a blogger just starting out, I don’t have the know-how or time to be generating list-posts. I prefer to write article-style articles and eventually hope to have some engaging conversations in the comments area.
List-posts seem to me like they’d take a fair while to research to ensure you’re getting all the relevant, quality and best sources to include in the list. Otherwise, what’s the point if you’re not presenting the best?
For me, that’s just time-wasting at its finest, but then I work a little slower than most and am still pretty green. Some designers and bloggers obviously have writing lists down to an art and can “churn” them out…
I like useful lists, not lists that rehash the same content over and over with no value add. Yes, it’s nice you have 20 minimal black WordPress templates, but why not take the extra time to write a review on each one? Why not do 10 templates and install each one and write what you found out?
If you look at magazine racks, the same tired headlines repeat month after month after month, and they work month after month after month. But it’s the magazines, and blogs, that do it just a little better than the next guy that become stand out.
It’s true that 90% of your traffic will come from 10% of your posts. A lot of new bloggers don’t know that. It’s even higher in some cases….99% of traffic coming literally from less than 10 posts. If that is the case, if you are going to do a sensational headline, you simply need to find a niche and do it really really well – do it better than anyone else has done it, and your blog and your reputation will do fine.
Be patient, do good work, and watch the visitors roll in.
” why not take the extra time to write a review on each one? Why not do 10 templates and install each one and write what you found out?”
Because no little blog poster who is only concerned about driving traffic to their blog just to make money off advertising is going to go to that much trouble and work. They are not going to install 10 themes and test them all out. It takes too much time for them, even though WordPress makes it quite easy to do.
I was going to add that from my own stats, too, it’s true that a handful of articles generate most of the traffic you’ll get. On my own site, the one article I did the most research for, and time preparing graphics for, is the most visited article on the site. Out of 100 articles or so, it gets about 80% of all my traffic. So it’s not a coincidence.
For instance, the research I did on both favorite fonts and useful font combinations, along with the graphics to go with it, proved useful to a lot of people reflected by how many retweets and incoming links the article got and continues to get each week since I published it quite a few months ago:
19 top fonts in 19 top combinations http://bit.ly/OfNDi
It has lead to offshoot related articles, which also get a lot of traffic daily, as well as an app and a forthcoming book.
So, I’m saying if you are going to do a list, do it. Do it right, get a niche, and work way too hard. It will pay off.
You could have _totally_ made this article be “Top 10 Reasons Lists Suck”!
Quick addition to my earlier comment:
The sorts of list posts I hate the most are the much aforementioned “1,563 Inspirational custard based designs” and the endless lists of jquery and wordpress plugins. List roundups suck too.
But in a few cases lists are not so bad – ones which provide valuable, unique and interesting information with each point such as a list of development best practices or something like that.
But even in those cases it shouldn’t be more than 10 items long, preferably 5/6, and each point should have a decent chunk of content to add extra value to it.
I think that sort of list will still be as popular as the poorer quality ones, but at the same time help more people.
I could not agree more. These non-relevant list posts just make it harder and harder to sift through all of the bullshit to find articles that are actually interesting and informative. Do we really need another “10 Free Paper Textures” list? Are “designers” incapable of actually crumpling a piece of paper and scanning it?? Don’t even get me started… dot com.
I agree to some extent. Not all lists are useful, in fact many of them are down right awful but I disagree that lists are overrated. People love lists and with good reason. It’s a quick fix for learning the top ranked of absolutely anything. This is interesting to me as the co-founder of Listiki.com. Listiki is all about lists. Moreover, it’s a list + wiki touch so anybody can edit these lists.
By allowing each user to have their own list but also allowing everybody else to contribute to that list which generates an average ranking. of everybody’s list. Now, that’s a list worth looking at – one that’s crowd generated and not simply by one “expert” on the subject. Pretty neat.
You can check it out at http://listiki.com/
I’d love to hear what you think. :)
I actually enjoy lists just as long as they give value.
For example, if I were going to purchase a new laptop I would like to know the top ten best laptops on the market.
Lists may be overrated based on what the topic is. But generally, they’re informative.
Interestingly, these aren’t the only sorts of things that effectively drive traffic… they’re simply the easiest and most obvious ones. For example, the primary drivers of traffic to my blog (which admittedly is fairly scattered in types of content) are all book reviews. They’re well written, carefully thought through, and say more than just “good” or “bad.” The trick is, generating that sort of content takes time, and time is something most bloggers are unwilling to really invest.
Personally, I would probably do much better if I were really focused on a single topic—regardless of using lists, etc. A team site I run does better for precisely that reason, despite being much younger. We try to create genuinely interesting, article-style content several times a week, and all of that is well and good… but we still get most of our hits from the few list-style posts we have, along with a couple hot-button topic posts and some book reviews.
My view is: use lists sparingly and carefully. When your blog starts to look like Smashing/wherever else that (seemingly) has nothing but lists, it may be getting lots of inbound traffic, but it’s not really a value site anymore. I never subscribe to those sorts of sites, even if I use them when thinking about design work. The real question is: are you going for pure hits, or for loyalty, or for both?
List/rundown posts still have value. In fact, when I launch my redesign in the next week or so, I plan on including a category for rundown posts because while I want my site to focus on original content above all else, I still want to share other ideas and sites that I find useful. I don’t care at all about increasing my site traffic or if anyone thinks I’m link baiting and so what if I was? As long as its interesting to the site owner, then there’s value in the posts. If you don’t like list posts, don’t write them and don’t visit them. I agree that rundown lists tend to be everywhere and are perhaps a little much but clearly they resonate with users if they still exist. Just sayin’.
I like building these kind of lists, but they must be really good quality lists. And yes, I did find boring useless lists on the web, which is very annoying. That is why when I publish a list, I try to make sure that you will like it and use it often :)
I think the article is focused on lists for web-design, fonts, templates etc which are mostly same and are boring I agree to that. But there are other types on lists too like movies, writing tips, shows, music etc but that then depends on the type of the blog it is.