I had to get this out and done with. This seems to be a ranting post but in reality, it Is a reflection on my own expectations and disappointments from an amazing platform that is bringing in changes without even publishing the rationale behind it.
First things first, I am still a blogger at Finextra and love the platform’s simplicity to post articles and blog posts, so no hard feelings there, but it’s their representation and analytics that is driving me crazy. The progressive layouts in past 1 year have been very confusing and I think whatever plan the design team is working on, seems to be counter-intuitive for the bloggers on the platform.
Indicators also show a similar story, only if the design team and web development team pay attention to those themselves. Finextra highlights a few site stats for all to see which includes an active count of Members, Comments (whatever that indicates — who tracks comments?), Posts ( a good indicator of how much content they have published) and most important Active Bloggers (this lists those people who have posted anything in the last 30 days — I think so, as the Finextra team hasn’t explained what time window they consider for this stat).
Finextra introduced the community feature I believe a few years back. People could create their groups where they felt a focused topic could drive more relevant viewership for a certain blog post, but still, the blog post was visible to all so everyone could see the content even if it wasn’t relevant to their search. Yes, there were some counter arguments that the relevant content gets lost in the blog listing as the primary page of blogs show only 10 most recent one, but the content was still searchable and will show high up if you select specific group content.
As its peak, I remember Active bloggers count crossed 1000 and remained that for a while. Which meant more than a 1000 people posted their content on Finextra every month and it was a preferred platform to post. Make no mistake it is still a platform to post about financial sector developments, especially driven by past 3 year’s Fintech revolution, the innovative and fresh content gave very high traction to Finextra in the Financial Sector blogging space. But this number is on the decline.
Changes brought in 2017
With last year’s change of Blog page layout, this active blogger count dipped to consistent 949–951 levels. Finextra lost it’s 6% active bloggers as they dropped some crucial blog stats from the individual blog page. Even though the design theme was far cleaner and smoother than before, dropping a few stats did take away some bloggers. A few still pending defects on those stats are
- Finextra shows the join date of the blogger to the platform but forgot to add the year in that date. So if I am a blogger for 5 years on the platform it will still show only Date & month, as if I joined this year on that date.
- Even though there is a Thumbs Up © Sign is present on the blog post page, it doesn’t work, no one can like the article, only the comments that someone is dropping on the article can be liked, which is quite silly.
- The blog views counter was dropped from the individual blog post page entirely which used to exist before
I can only say blogging is a labor-intensive task, people do researches and spend time in writing their posts. These small stats help writers to understand what sort of content readers like or read, and then they can fine-tune their style to write more immersive and interesting blogs. These days very few people take the effort to write comments, and mostly the comments are sometimes complaints or arguments about the content, very few are for sharing their own experience to counter or agree with the blogger’s perspective and sometimes even random ad posts by random people to drive traffic to their own sites.
So, if the basic Like dislike feature is not working then the basic feedback loop is broken. Also some bloggers take pride in highlighting that they’re part of a platform for a long time, a basic miss-out of year value in the date joined detaches that affiliation of the blogger from the platform, and finally dropping the blog view stat from the blog means the one who is reading has no idea how many people read this piece (they did use to show blog view count at the main blog page as an indicator) so this was just a minor blip.
Changes effective from Oct-2018
Now, with the latest changes done in Oct-2018 to the main blog page, the Active blogger count has dropped to 929 active bloggers, which means within 2 weeks of those changes kicking in they lost another 2–2.5% active blogger. This is still to be seen if this is just a short-term trend, as people will slowly adjust to the new layout and start writing again, or this will further drop indicating people really disliked the new change.
With the new change, I agree that design theme became far more clear and cleaner which matches the individual blog posts theme, but Finextra dropped all stats they used to show on Blog’s homepage entirely, losing its novelty and unique differentiation from other platforms entirely.
To add to this, the only extra links provided are Filter by sector & Filter by Author, out of which Filter by Author doesn’t work. So, if someone wants to look at the posts submitted by me after reading one of my posts, can’t do that as the resulting filter doesn’t work at all and it still shows all latest blogs.
Also, by dropping all stats from the main page mains there is no incentive for bloggers to keep posting content as original stats were creating a sort of gamification that was encouraging bloggers to keep writing in order to be featured as the top bloggers or most engaging bloggers (if they’re receiving a lot of comments).
This makes Finextra blog like my own personal WordPress blog, the only novelty left is the Finextra’s old history and a lot of content sites picking content from Finextra to quote on social networks through bots. Your content may still get a bit more viewership by posting it on Finextra than on your own blog.
Conclusion
We understand that maintaining and upgrading any blogging platform is a hard task and especially if you’re understaffed and have limited resources then these changes take time to come to fruition. So I hope with more changes kicking in these issues may get sorted.
But, with basic stats & gamification gone, I suspect the content frequency will get impacted but how much we’ll only see a few months down the line. I will post another post on this by mid next year to see how the platform fares with the changes and if they bring back some of their features to revive their content volumes.
Thoughts Unplugged !!! 