How it will all end

Now that I’ve had time to sit back and watch the anib­log tour­ney play out to a cer­tain degree, I feel I can make some reas­on­able pre­dic­tions on how this will pan out. First, there’s the issue of how many people will show up, which I shall now demon­strate using this poorly drawn graph.

There’s the ori­ginal burst in hits as the tour­ney hits the scene, fol­lowed by a sharp drop as those who never really had much interest in the tour­ney in the first place stop vis­it­ing. The core audi­ence of the tour­ney will make up most of the hits, mainly con­sist­ing of blog­gers and those who read anime blogs on a reg­u­lar enough basis to already be fairly in tune with anime blogs in gen­eral. There will also be a few people who show up ran­domly but these will make up a small per­cent­age of the people vis­it­ing. Also, these people might be slightly put off by the num­ber of blogs present along with the lower qual­ity of those blogs on dis­play. Hence the extra hits these blogs are get­ting are mainly com­ing from those inside the sphere already. An echo-chamber, circle wank, whatever you want to call it, is what’s hap­pen­ing. Not that the other blogs com­pet­ing in the first round aren’t get­ting read­ers from out­side the sphere. The tour­ney has got­ten hits from places well out­side the sphere, but it’s mainly an echo-chamber.

How­ever the import­ant thing here is that (sorry if I hurt some feel­ings here) the tour­ney is genu­inely vot­ing for­ward the bet­ter blogs. Not those that are most known inside the sphere or those with big repu­ta­tions, but on the genu­ine qual­ity of the blogs in ques­tion. Many will point to the fact that it’s mainly been on first impres­sions, which I’ll get to later. With the second round begin­ning and the big­ger name blogs com­pet­ing, more people will start show­ing up because of how inter­est­ing the match ups are. It’s already clear that the more inter­est­ing the match up on that week is, the more people pay atten­tion. The Colony Drop post is trib­ute to that, which is why I kinda want them to win. A lot of these people aren’t actu­ally vis­it­ing the sites in ques­tion or even vot­ing in the other poll, but enough are for it to make a dif­fer­ence. And again, the genu­inely good blogs should con­tinue to advance. Case point here would be Mecha-Guignol, a rel­at­ively unknown blog­ger whose pop­ular­ity has sud­denly increased thanks to the tour­ney. Just look at how much more com­ments he’s got on his latest post com­pared to the older ones. Ah, I remem­ber when there was only about 5 people who ever com­men­ted on that blog~

The import­ant point here is that the ran­domers vis­it­ing the tour­ney will now be faced with rounds with genu­inely good blogs com­pet­ing. Bet­ter yet, a lot of these blogs have been voted up on first impres­sions, which means the ran­domers with the typ­ical Inter­net interest span of maybe 20 seconds will be impressed quickly. And they will too start to visit these blogs and become read­ers. And this shall con­tinue as the rounds pro­gress. More people will start to fol­low the tour­ney as the rounds pro­gress because the qual­ity of the blogs on dis­play will also increase. What people tend to for­get is how few people act­ively search out anime blogs to read. Those who fol­low none will start to read those who ranked in the semis and the final. Those who only read the big ones will start to fol­low some of the other high qual­ity ones that have pro­gressed fur­ther. Basic­ally, if you’re someone read­ing this post and feel rather over­whelmed by the tour­ney, it might be bet­ter to wait for some of the later rounds.

I said it on the open­ing post. This tour­ney is to pro­mote good blogs who aren’t maybe get­ting the atten­tion they deserve. So far, people are vot­ing up the blogs they genu­inely think are bet­ter. The only prob­lem I can see thus far is that blogs that may appeal to a spe­cific audi­ence are los­ing out, which is just some­thing that is an inher­ent flaw with demo­cracy any­way. I per­son­ally like to err on the side of ori­gin­al­ity when vot­ing in the tour­ney (for example, I voted both Colony Drop and Anime Instru­ment­al­ity because they both cover things almost no other blogs do). I really hope people do con­tinue to vote for the actual blogs them­selves and not based on friend­ships, ran­dom twit­ter cam­paigns or repu­ta­tion that they were once a good blogger.

As for the ques­tion people really care about; who is going to win the thing, I’ve noticed a cer­tain tend­ency to vote against epis­odic blogs, although pretty much all the big guns in the epis­odic blog­ging world got byes in the first round. Those think­ing Ran­dom Curi­os­ity will steam­roll the thing are totally under­es­tim­at­ing the back­lash people will have to these types of blogs. I am a bet­ting man though, so my guess would be for Sea Slugs to win the whole thing (they’re num­ber one seed for a reason). I think it largely depends on how good the most recent posts are on the edit­or­ial blogs are when they are fea­tured. What do you guys think?

::Note:: this is the optim­istic view. The pess­im­istic view is that almost every­one stops caring after the first round and it becomes a total circle jerk between a select few