What do sneaker blogs really write about?4

What do sneaker blogs really write about it?

Uh…sneakers?

Yup.

I guess this post is over.

But, wait.

What if we, like, put some numbers behind it?

What would that look like?

I’m glad you asked.

We looked at twenty high-profile blogs and broke down their content every which way to come up with a view of who’s writing what, how often and where.

Methodology

• All sneaker blog content was collected using the Feedly RSS Reader.
• We identified the top 18 most prolific sneaker blogs we could capture using Feedly, and added Finish Line and Foot Locker for good measure.
• Unfortunately, not all sneaker blogs are RSS-friendly and therefore some do not show up in Feedly (or, at least, didn’t show up on October 8 when we pulled the data). We know of at least two sites – Kicks Deals and IcySole.com – which may have made the list had we been able to access their content.
• Any other sneaker blogs which might publish enough posts per month to warrant placement in the top 18 but were left off is either a function of Feedly or entirely our fault for not being familiar with your work.  We sincerely apologize if we missed anyone, but we do track 63 different sneaker blogs on Feedly, so it’s not like we aren’t trying.
• The final list, in alphabetical order, is:  Complex Sneakers, Counter Kicks, Finish Line, Foot Locker, Jordans Daily, Kicks Addict, Kicks on Fire, KixandtheCity, Modern Notoriety, Nice Kicks, Sneaker Files, Sneaker Freaker, Sneaker News, Sneaker Report, Sneaker Watch, Sole Collector, Sole-U, The Shoe Game, UG Soles, WearTesters.  (Which comes out to 6 sneakers, 5 kicks and 3 soles).
• Sneaker blog posts were collected from a 30 day period, from September 9 through October 8, 2014.
• All data in our analysis is based on the first 400 characters of each blog post (~80 words), including the title. This is due to Feedly restrictions. However, we think this creates a decent (and consistent) line of demarcation between the subject of a post and a casual mention.
• Approximately 100 unique keywords were identified and used to categorize the blog post content. These keywords include all sneaker brands (Nike, Jordan, Adidas, etc.), prominent sub-brands (Air Max, Jordan Future, etc.), sneaker personalities (Ronnie Fieg, DJ Clark Kent, etc.), prominent sneaker shop collaborators (Concepts, UNDFTD, etc.), and resell channels (eBay, Flight Club, etc.).

The first chart is our high level scorecard: how many posts does each blog publish a month:

Between the twenty blogs there were a total of 6,684 total posts:

• Kicks on Fire was the clear leader with 823 – over 100 more than 2^nd place – Sneaker News at 718.
• The next tier is pretty tight with 2^nd to 4^th place separated by less than 35 posts.  These could easily change places if we looked at a different 30-day period.
• Relative newcomer WearTesters landed at 6^th place with 406 posts a month – it sure feels like there are 406 new releases a month he could be testing.

Now that we know the “who” and the “how much”, let’s look at the “what”.  This is the brand and sub-brand breakdown for the aggregate twenty blogs:

Of no surprise to anyone, Nike is the clear leader.  Or . . . we’re just as surprised as you to see that Nike is the clear leader . . . said no one ever.

• Almost 3,000 posts – or 45% of total posts – are about Nike.
• After Jordan Brand and Adidas there is a big fall off to Reebok at number 4, with 224 posts.
• It’s worthwhile to note that the sum of the numbers on this page equals more than 6,684 because some posts mention multiple brands.
• As far as sub-brands go, the breakdown of Nike, Jordan and Adidas feels in line with what was hot last month and what is constantly in the news.
• The Nike Basketball breakdown is interesting: LeBron 414, Durant 264, Kobe 164.  At some point we’ll have to compare the volume of resale dollars to the number of posts for each player.

With the aggregate brands stats as background, we can now review which blogs are writing about which brands, and how frequently:

(It might help to double click this one and look at a larger version)

The use of a “heat map”, as we’ve done, makes it very easy to see where the mass of posts are occurring. The darker the color, the greater percentage of blogs posts about that topic.

• Again, not surprisingly, Nike and Jordan Brand have the greatest volume.
• Like the last chart, the sum of the percentages do not equal 100% because some posts mention multiple brands.
• Besides Jordans Daily – which, true to its name, is 98.5% Jordans – every blog is at least 31% Nike. Complex Sneakers has the lowest percentage at 31.6%. UG Soles has the highest percentage of Nike posts, at 63.5%.
• Complex Sneaker appears to have the greatest diversity of brands covered, with at least 1% of every brand except Li-Ning and Under Armour.
• Sneaker Report has a whopping 43.9% of their posts which are not about any brands. What the hell are they writing about over there? A quick review of their posts and we see titles like, “Bryan Cranston’s One Man Show Will Get You Excited About Baseball Again”. Well, true, Cranston’s show is almost as good as Nike Fun Police ads (“You don’t even let the ground touch the ball”), but we’re not seeing the sneaker tie-in.
• Perhaps the most amazing stats is that 11.9% of Counter Kicks posts are about Under Armour. The next most? WearTesters at 2%. That’s crazy! Does someone over at Counter Kicks own stock in UA?
• Finally, UG Soles and Foot Locker have no posts about any brands besides Nike, Jordan and Adidas.
• For UG Soles, only 2.2% is Adidas – the rest is Nike and Jordan. Damn. Someone send those dudes a Saucony.
• Although Foot Locker only had 28 posts in total, we still hope Asics, Puma and UA aren’t reading this!

Moving down the sneaker food chain from brand to sub-brand, the next stop is obviously model:

The seven sneakers shown here were either imminent releases or in the news during the time of the posts.

• The fact that Air Jordans would dominate this list, followed by Nike, is obvious-balls.
• But not even the top shoe – the Air Jordan 1 Jeter – was covered by all 20 blogs.
• The Kasina x Puma Disc pack was a great, great shoe, but Kasina is a Korean boutique, it had limited release in the US, and it’s a Puma.  All those things combined to put it at the bottom of this list – only 11 total posts from 9 different blogs.  But those same factors allowed me to cop a gem that very few other people will have.

Now that’s we’ve gone deep on posts about sneaker brands and actual sneakers, let’s see what else blogs are writing about. Sneaker personalities, resell channels and boutiques are definitely regular topics. And every now and then someone actually writes about Campless (hint: not a lot of people):

Under the category of “No shit, Sherlock”, Kanye and Yeezy crush all competitors in this analysis:

• eBay is a respectable third.
• Sadly, only three different blogs have written about Campless over the past month (Nice Kicks, Finish Line and Sneaker Watch).
• On the blog side, Sneaker News and Sneaker Watch are the clear leaders in sneaker topic posts.
• Sneaker Report – which had by the far the most non-brand posts (43.9%) in the last chart – doesn’t seem to be writing about sneaker topics either, with only 5 total posts.

For our brief foray into social, we did a quick comparison of number of posts versus Twitter followers:

You can read this chart on your own.  If you’ve actually read this far into the post and want some insight on this chart, tweet us @Campless and let us know you got this far.  I’m guessing exactly zero people take us up on that.

Finally, we leave you with what we think is the most interesting of all analyses – how often sneaker blogs write about other sneaker blogs.  Not surprisingly, this chart is sparse:

For this analysis we decided to use only the top 10 sneaker blogs (most posts), despite the fact that 8 of these 10 are members of the Complex network.  When we included the next 10 there were way too many zeros (yes, even more than above).

• In total, only .8% of all posts mention another sneaker blog in a prominent place – that’s 42 total posts out of 5,107.  And 31 of them are within the Complex network.
• Complex has the most mentions by other blogs (16), but only 2 of them are from outside their network (1 each from Nice Kicks and Modern Notoriety)
• After Complex, Sneaker Freaker was a solid second with 11 mentions from 6 blogs.  Perhaps it has something to do with Australia. Who knows.
• The following blogs had zero mentions about them from other blogs within the top 20:  Kicks on Fire, Sole-U, Jordans Daily, UG Soles, Kicks Addiction, KixandtheCity, Counter Kicks, TheShoeGame, SneakerFiles, IcySole.

There are a lot of inferences one could make from this data, a lot of them either negative or, at the very least, business-competitive.  But perhaps the point isn’t that sneaker blogs are territorial, but rather, the issue is simply that there isn’t too much to write about in the first place.  In fact, when we look through all of the above charts analyzing what sneaker blogs are actually writing about, that answer seems all the more likely.

Again, apologies to any sneaker blogs we may have missed due to Feedly issues.

What do you think?  Do sneaker blogs generate enough unique content?  Which ones do it the best?

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