From Humor to ‘How-To’ – Lifestyle Blogs Prove Influential in Mainstream Media

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This next post in our series on the Power 50 examines which blogs in the Lifestyle & Entertainment category are most often cited as sources by mainstream media and why.

KEY FINDINGS

Given their broad appeal, lifestyle and entertainment blogs were unsurprisingly the most common type of blog in the Power 50 (32% of the Power 50 blogs) and were cited almost as often as technology blogs (14% of all citations in the Power 50). The top five lifestyle/entertainment blogs included: Treehugger, Boing Boing, Stereogum, The Consumerist and Apartment Therapy.

ANALYSIS

Generally, lifestyle blogs tend to be mentioned in the lists of websites that appear within the lifestyle sections or humor columns of newspapers. In one example, icanhascheezburger.com appeared in a list of sites for people who need “a new way to waste time at work” in the Chicago Tribune on October 8, 2008. In other cases, readers were directed to blogs for various tips, such as Treehugger for ideas on how to be environmentally friendly on Earth Day or to LifeHacker for instructions on how to add memory to a computer. In this sense, these blogs were treated much like technology blogs by traditional media in that they were used as secondary, supplementary sources for news stories, rather than the source for breaking news.

CONCLUSION

Lifestyle blogs are ripe with opportunity for content creation, especially useful tips, tutorials and informative guest posts. It is important that proper research is conducted, however, as many of the blogs that fall under the ‘entertainment/lifestyle’ category cater to niche communities with very specific tastes and needs. Timing is also important for pitching these blogs, as they tend to get more attention from mainstream media around the holidays and events associated with their content, as the Treehugger example above suggests.

This post is a part of a series on the Power 50, a study of the most influential blogs as cited by mainstream media.