The Hillbilly Ecosystem

Speaking of the Hillbilly Ecosystem there is a little part of it that is broke and I'm going to fix it this weekend. When I wrote the descriptions for the levels I didn't know nearly as much about the way that blogging works as I do now.

Specifically I didn't realize how easy it was to rise through the TTLB Ecosystem and how hard it was to get actual traffic. According to TTLB Hillbilly White Trash is a Playful Primate and the 83rd most popular blog in their ecosystem. Yet I get fewer than 200 hits on most days.

The truth is that it is very easy to rise in the TTLB ranks. All you have to do is join a bunch of blog alliances like the Fighting KeeBees (that gets you 3oo + links at one pop) or The Alliance or Homespun Bloggers or any of a number of others.

There's nothing wrong with that. That is a big part of the reason why I started the Hillbilly Ecosystem. However when I wrote the descriptions for the Hillbilly Ecosystem levels I was still assuming that you had to work for every link. At that time the only blogs that linked to me were the ones like White Trash Republican who had chanced across my blog and liked it enough to add it to her blogroll or Moxie who does link exchanges or Sondra K whose blog I liked so much that I asked her to blogroll me.

At the same time I underestimated how hard it is to build readership. I figured that with millions of people reading blogs every day that even crappy blogs would get hundreds of hits per day and good blogs would get thousands. After all Instapundit gets over 100,000 hits a day and the guy doesn't even write!

I was wrong. The number of blogs is growing exponentially while the number of blog readers is staying about the same. This means that ever more bloggers are chasing a finite number of readers and it is getting harder and harder to find an audience.

For these reasons I am going to raise the number of links that one needs to rise in the Hillbilly Ecosystem a bit while lowering the amount of traffic one needs to advance. For example I'm lowering the number of hits per day to be a Plant Manager from 2000 per day to 1000. There will be some other changes, but that's about the largest.

This will make it eaiser to rise through the Hillbilly system and, I hope, make it more fun for the members.