The other day I bumped into Kent Shaffer’s list of top church blogs. Many of them I follow or at least visit occasionally. Several of them I’ve never heard of. This list isn’t Kent’s favorite blogs, it’s determined by readership subscriptions, page ranks, technorati ranks, and several other factors. They’re on the list because they have thousands of readers.
Here’s something interesting I noticed. Just a few years ago, these blogs didn’t exist. This type of information was typically distributed in magazines. Most of these blog authors would be regularly featured in ministry magazines. I’m simply amazed by how much more information is available to us today as opposed to a few years ago when magazines had the sole responsibility of distributing this kind of information. Sure, magazines do a great job of editing and through these 100 most popular blogs, we get a fair amount of “fluff.” I’m not saying that the magazine is dead, but the blog certainly has crowded the platform they used to hold exclusively.
Oh, one more thing I’ve noticed. Where are the magazines? On this list of top 100 church blogs, only one of them is a magazine (that I could tell). That’s Collide Magazine. Where are the others? There are several other great ministry magazines that have INCREDIBLE content, yet they’re only delivering it analog. When I look at the industry as a whole, magazines are putting most if not all of their content online whether you are a subscriber or not and they’re dominating in the blogging world. I don’t know that much about the magazine world, but why aren’t all the ministry magazines topping the list of this list of top church blogs? I’m sure it has to do with profitability and subscribership and not wanting to cannibalize paid subscriptions with free online access. However, how does Collide do it?
Just my random thoughts and questions.
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