Why not ask, um….me? That’s what Seth Roberts did:
When I visited George Mason University recently, I asked Tyler
Cowen, “What’s the secret of a successful blog?” Cowen and Tabarrok’s Marginal Revolution is the most successful blog I know of.His answer: “Three elements: 1. Expertise. 2. Regularity. 3.
Recurring characters, like a TV show.” By regularity he meant at least
5 times/week.
Here is my previous post on Seth Roberts. Here Seth makes a cameo appearance with Alex.
A couple of other things I think makes this blog good: It has a mix of short and longer posts, with none too long (if I wanted to read something longer I would read a book or something). It also mixes more intellectual posts about economics with links to interesting stories and websites. Lastly, although it has a libertarian bent it is not pushing that all of the time like Cafe Hayek or something.
I might also say, at the risk of sounding like a kiss-up, that there’s a very virtuous self-reinforcing cycle with this blog. The quality of the blog and Tyler and Alex’s comment and follow-up policies makes this the best blog to find good comments, too.
I read ME because it’s linky, meaty, seldom ranting, and it answers yes to the question that keeps me coming back to anything, whether we’re talking about a blog, a tv show, a store, a musuem or a person : Can you tell me about something / someone / some place interesting while entertaining me in the process?
I would say the #1 secret to the success of Tyler’s blog is Tyler. Not very many people can do what he does.
Is this the most successful high-IQ blog around? I get about half the number of daily visits of MR at my iSteve.com blog, although I don’t have comments, and comments inflate the visitorship statistics as the same individuals check back many times per day. But, clearly, MR is doing very well for a far right edge of the Bell Curve blog.
Part of your problem, Sailer, is that you’re Johnny One Note: the dumb Mexicans are coming to ruin America. For those of us who aren’t terrified of brown people, your fearmongering and racism grow tiresome quickly.
One point that hasn’t been brought up yet: Marginal Revolution has short blog posts, so it’s very accessible, even when the material is deep.
- Josh
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