The Science of Marketing

I love statistics. I especially love stats that, when combined with other stats, yield interesting and useful information – whether it’s the Quarterback Rating, the baseball Fielding Percentage or ESPN’s Fantasy Uber Score. But when it comes to rating a blog, I’m not in love with the options. The best that I have found is the Blog Juice Rating. But I believe its formula leaves much to be desired.

If you are not familiar with it, the Blog Juice Rating (or BJR) is a number from 0.0 to 10.0 that ranks the "juice" of a blog. While the absolute BJR may not be all that useful, changes to the rating are. The BJR is composed of four statistics and weightings: number of Blogline subscribers (40%), Alexa rank (15%), Technorati rank (30%), and number of inbound links according to Technorati (15%). There is some scaling of the numbers, but basically a BJR is the sum of the weighted statistics. Scaling aside, I don’t think the weightings and component statistics accurately gauge a blog’s juice. If it were me, I would…

• Eliminate the Alexa ranking. Alexa ranks all web sites and does not specifically rank blogs.

• Flip the weightings of Blogline subscribers and inbound links. Inbound links are an indication that people are actually reading (and reacting to) a blog; subscribers may, or may not, be reading. As an aside, how many people use Bloglines to subscribe anyway? It would be nice to count the total number of RSS subscriptions with something like Feedburner.

• Divide the Alexa weighting allocation between Technorati (which is focused on blogs) and inbound links – 5 to Technorati and 10 to inbound links.

So, my new improved BJR would be: inbound links (50%), Technorati rank (35%) and total RSS subscribers (15%).

Does anyone have any other suggestions on enhancements to the BJR? Does anyone know of any other useful blog ratings schemes?

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