To blog or not to blog: Characterizing and predicting retention in community blogs

Community blogging is a medium for publishing daily journals, expressing opinions or ideas, and sharing knowledge. Blogging has a high impact on marketing, shaping public opinions, and informing the world about major events from a grassroots point of view. However, turnover in online blogging is very high, with most people who initially join and start contributing to the community, failing to contribute in the long run. In this paper, we ask what factors cause a blogger to continue participating in the community by contributing content (e.g., posts, comments). We crawled a sample of blogger profiles from a popular community blogging platform \Blogster". These bloggers contributed about 91% posts in the community. We derived a set of well-grounded variables related to blogger retention and built a predictive model from the variables. Our results show that the male and aged (senior) bloggers, who face fewer constraints and have more opportunities in the community are more retained than others. Other bloggers pay a high degree of attention to these retained bloggers through implicit (reading posts) and explicit (writing comments) interactions. We have also found that a blogger has higher retention if her friends have also higher retention and a strong social tie reduces retention imbalance between two blogger friends. However, we found that a blogger's network age (e.g., how long ago she joined) has no effect on her retention. Our work has theoretical implications for the social behavior literature of bloggers, and practical implications for potential community blogging platform developers.