Why I’m giving up hosting Blog Carnivals
Written by Karen Bryan
I started hosting the Europe Travel Blog Carnival on the Europe a la Carte Blog in March 2008. I wanted to create a Carnival which would be more than a rather ugly cut and paste job by adding photos and my own comments to the submissions.
Carnaval de Putignana by loloieg
It was pretty time consuming collating the monthly editions. I was bombarded with submissions that had nothing to do with travel in Europe and general spam. However one of the main issues I had was the the authors of the submission didn’t bother to link back to the Blog Carnival in order to give everyone involved more publicity.
Now after more than one year of hosting monthly Blog Carnivals, I’ve reached the stage of thinking, why I am bothering spending hours every month preparing a Carnival and decided to call it a day. There are plenty of other things on which I could be spending my time.
Do you host a Blog Carnival, if so do you see it as a worthwhile investment of your time? If you submit to Blog Carnivals do you link back to the Canival?
I do host carnivals at times, though I don’t run one. One example is the latest Carnival of Cities last week.
You’re right that most don’t ever link back, which is a shame, but I do get some reasonable link love out of it, especially from the better blogs that take part.
Funny, the worse the blog, the greedier they are with the links.
Jack – thanks for your feedback. Yes it’s less work if the hosting is shared between several blogs. I did ask for volunteers to host the Europe Travel Carnival in several posts and Heather of Heatheronhertravels.com did host it once when I was on holiday. I think that’s because hosting the Europe Travel Carnival took a lot more time and effort than the standard cut and paste Carnival.
I wanted to create a Travel Carnival that was more appealing to readers, although perhaps that was misguided and if the main purpose of Carnival is to get links, a cut and paste effort does the job.
I have managed a carnival for several years. I agree they do take time. I also don’t think the cutting and pasting submissions is of much use. Much of the effort is something I would do anyway and I just have to select good posts to highlight. It does still take time though and I get others to host maybe half of them:
What a shame Karen, and sorry to hear about spammers invading it too. I’d love to take part in a few and seem to keep missing the boat with them, a recent slow travel one I missed for example. And yes everyone should definitely link back to it and do a little to promote it too, what’s wrong with people?! Maybe that should just be a condition of being published in it?
Am toying with the idea of doing a mini one myself, really just a few posts over course of a month or so, on people’s best/worst rail journeys and train stations. Thinking of using twitter to get submissions. They don’t need to be long but needs to be a variety and good quality.
Jools – I found it took a lot of time to do more than the quick cut and paste Blog Carnival done by many sites. I just thought why I’m spending all this time and giving away links to other blogs, who’re happy to get the exposure but can’t be bothered to help promote the Carnival
I don’t blame you Karen. But let me know if you ever do resurrect it, I will support it properly. Some others I’ve seen do seem a bit ‘thrown together.’