telematic's soup

TL;DR: The Problem With Long-Form Publishing Plays
tldr
Last week, our writer Devin Coldewey wrote a 3,000-word essay on Google+. It got 114 comments. Comment numbers are a wildly inaccurate metric for popularity in general - some posts get 100 comments because they're poorly written, sensationalistic, and/or just strike a nerve - but in this case 114 is a good number for a long piece on a relatively boring subject. On the same day we posted a video filmed inside Dropbox HQ with a 298-word post attached and a post about 99dresses that topped out at 501 words. Those got 18 and 41 comments, respectively. I could probably dig into our metrics, but you could argue that all three of those posts were interesting to our audience and that, on a comment-per-word basis, Devin had to write 26 words to get one comment while the Dropbox post needed 18 words per comment. The 99dresses post had 12 words per comment. It's inexact science, to be sure, but bear with me.