Last Post in English

8 to 10 folks that show up here from day to day. Thank you. But this is the last post of this blog written in english. This is what I may call as a business decision, since while writing in english I fall on the same niche as the well established guys who have been posting for a long time and already created a devoted following. They have been doing it for such a long time they can afford to live of their blogs. I find this admirable and I aim it as a goal to pursue.

But then I look at my surroundings. Brazil has a really poor coverage when it comes down to Apple products. Most of the sites have a silly Wordpress theme you can ogle from miles away. But there are no opinions, most of what you get are translations from The Verge and other famous news sites.

Brazil has this sort of fame to back it up, specially if you keep track on Facebook shares, a bunch of viral material that goes live on social media around here is a mere translation or adaptation. I’m not pretending to judge that brazilian folks aren’t creative, just check out Forbes’ article on ‘Porta dos Fundos’, a comedy Youtube channel to realize the opposite. The point is that brazilians prefer to read in portuguese, even though I may prejudiciously guess that due to the exorbitant prices for Apple products around here, most of them may have education in the english language.

One of the brazilian magazines specialized in Apple news, at the moment holds almost 37k likes on Facebook, meanwhile, my patron, AppStorm, has less than one-fifth of that. The Verge has more than 128k likes, Ars Technica just crossed the 89k line, Cult of Mac, almost 56k, TUAW, below 14k. It is tough to use Facebook as a parameter to evaluate opinion-based websites, as most of them aren’t promoted on that social network, even though it would be important for the brazilians to get involved there. So let’s use Twitter for a change.

The brazilian magazine has almost 70k followers, The Verge has more than 3 times that. Ars Technica goes above the whooping half million followers, while Cult of Mac is almost there and TUAW stands around 115,900 followers and AppStorm has little more than 25k followers in the Mac department.

When it goes down to opinion-based blogs is where Twitter shines. Viticci has more than 22k followers, Shawn and Sparks are close to 9k, Terpstra right behind, Patrick Rhone has less than 4k. Meanwhile, Marco holds more than 56k followers and Gruber, from Daring Fireball is above 260k followers.

The goal is not to grab several followers, this is only a way to visualize the popularity of a subject of interest. So taking in consideration that the most popular tech news site has half-million and the top opinion-based is around 50% of that and that the brazilian field is empty, asking for an adventurer like myself to take the reins, I wouldn’t be surprised if in a couple of years I reach at least 25% of the community targeted by the brazilian magazine, around 18k followers.

The objective is to be read and to be useful to a slice of society. Of course, you can say that if I publish interesting content, I’ll have the share attached to the big guys, but I believe there’s a limit of opinion that someone strive for and as I stand in the middle of the crowd, playing their game, it is difficult to stand out. So from now on I’ll add my own twist to the game.