PZ and Eddy bail on National Geographic's ScienceBlogs.com
July 30, 2011
Well this news is big. HUGE, in fact.
It is no secret that these two guys’ political content draws the lion’s share of the traffic to Sb. Meaning two-thirds or better, day in and year out.
I will be absolutely fascinated to see how much remains at Sb after they move to freethoughtblogs.com on Monday.
My prediction is: Very Little.
DrugMonkey 
July 30, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Guess who’s also joining freethoughtblogs!!!!!!!!
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July 30, 2011 at 1:47 pm
My prediction is: Very Little.
Word. Though I still read your blog.
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July 30, 2011 at 1:57 pm
This will probably be a bigger deal when Freethought Blogs moves out of maintenance mode. Though the name suggests I probably won’t enjoy reading a huge number of things over there.
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July 30, 2011 at 2:54 pm
I can’t say I will miss them. The political bickering wasn’t my thing. What would a reduction in traffic mean for SB anyway?
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July 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Some of us remember when PZ would blog about science and educate a huge number of people about interesting topics they maybe otherwise would have never heard about. No when he writes about science, though it is much more rare, he almost always includes shots at the nuts. I’m sure they deserve it, but it is a different place now.
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July 31, 2011 at 6:38 am
Marcus, Sb is (or was) an advertising medium. Eyeballs = $$ in that business. It is not yet clear what the new owner, National Geographic, intends Sb to be in the future. It is nearly inconceivable that they would not have understood that their “standards” were going to lose them Pharyngula and Dispatches. So perhaps they have a new vision of Sb as a product that can run in the red?
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July 31, 2011 at 7:52 am
Let’s not get crazy. He’s not really leaving Sb….
And I am still not convinced that this is the devestating financial blow everyone else thinks it is.
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July 31, 2011 at 10:37 am
The quote/unquote respectables, besides some already essentially being professional writers, jumped from Sb to Discovery or elsewhere precisely to distance from PZ, in addition to any money, I might wager. His shtick is dicey to advertisers who might not want the boat rocked by someone who comes across as shrill and nasty. Atheist fights on the internet are not what I would guess NatGeo would really want. Who is the real owner of NatGeo blogs? I think I read that NatGeo TV was owned by Fox.
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July 31, 2011 at 11:10 am
Wouldn’t you be curious to see how Ed Yong’s blog traffic stacks up against PZ’s Isis and Pinko P?
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July 31, 2011 at 8:59 pm
Well, it sounds like PZ is going to segregate his content so Sb Pharyngula is more science education/evolution/anti-creationism and the bomb throwing is on the new one. I think this is a good thing.
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August 1, 2011 at 9:16 am
So he’s not leaving completely? Too bad. There is too much bigotry on Science Blogs, and it is counter-productive, not to mention incredibly offensive, when in comes to science education and outreach. Good riddance to Brayton. National Geographic can surely do better.
PZ separating his content? How will he, and especially his commenters, separate “anti-creationism” from “bomb-throwing”?
For example, I wonder which category his recent complaining about chaplains in schools and calling them “lice” (in the headline yet) fits in?
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August 2, 2011 at 8:45 am
I imagine SB and NatGeo are glad to see this happening. As far as content goes, some of those posts could be seen more as a liability than a benefit. As Iasbel said, this will hopefully refocus the main voice of the network on outreach as a opposed to religion bashing and politics.
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August 3, 2011 at 12:44 am
There are still some excellent blogs at SB, and I think their traffic will pick up once Brayton departs and PZ segregates content. PZ does, every now and then, write good science-oriented posts with no political or anti-religious content.
SB has that sidebar which shows the posts with the “most activity”. Up until now that sidebar has been dominated by the endless comment-threads of PZ and Brayton. It’ll be interesting to see what blogs show up there once the transition is complete.
There is also the possibility that SB will do some blogger recruiting — look at how quickly the SciAM blog network developed.
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August 3, 2011 at 12:09 pm
The SciAm network wasn’t all that “quick”, they hired Bora something like 6 mo ago? More?
Also, you might ask yourself whether Sb has done any decent recruiting in the past couple of years and whether they’ve been able to hang onto the best or not….past is prologue I hear.
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August 3, 2011 at 9:28 pm
So why are you still there, DM?
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August 4, 2011 at 8:48 am
The LuLz, N-c.
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August 7, 2011 at 3:52 pm
N-c, it’s kinda like being at a party you know has hit its peak and is about to break up, but you don’t want to leave just in case something big happens.
At the very least, I could’ve stayed just to take $50/month for spite. I’m still getting 700 hits per day of legacy traffic on my dead blog.
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August 8, 2011 at 7:19 am
Funny, both Ed and PZ are “segregating their content” to be able to keep one foot in the Sb, as it turns out. Should soften the blow considerably. Still going to lead to a decline in traffic if my experience doing the same is any guide.
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