Blog Conversations Don't Lead to More Views or Links [New Data]

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My favorite unicorns and rainbows myth to pick on is "engage in the conversation." While it can be useful for customer service, from a results-driven marketing perspective, I believe conversations aren't very important.

To continue proving that point, I analyzed comment, view and link data on over 100,000 blog posts. What I found may surprise some.

There is no correlation between the number of comments on a post and the number of views that post got. There's also no correlation between comments and the number of links that post got. There is some positive correlation between views and links. To view the linear correlation and scatter-plot data see the graphs below.

With your blog, comments should not be a goal. They don't lead to views or links, which is what leads to actual revenue. Engaging in the conversation doesn't work.

The correlation numbers in the above graphic are linear regressions. The scatter plots are shown on double logrithmic scales to show that there is no non-linear correlations in the data.