Probably, almost all regular readers and authors of the site know that articles here on the site can be published by both individual authors and corporate accounts. Involuntarily a "childish" question arises - which is better? Which articles get more ratings and comments? What is closer to corporate blogs - to annoying ads that you can only scroll through, or useful information? Let's try to figure it out.
For those who are interested, the continuation under the cut.
To begin with, a traditional disclaimer: all the data presented are unofficial, and I do not exclude that I was not mistaken anywhere. All information was collected by the parser using Python and processed using Pandas and Matplotlib.
Who Will Benefit, Authors or Corporate Blogs? Go.
Number of publications
To begin with, let's answer the simplest question - what materials are published more?
For 2020, at the time of this writing, 9066 articles were published in corporate blogs, a little more - 9151 by individual authors. But in principle, these numbers can be considered more or less the same, the error is about 1%.
While the score is 1: 1.
Rating
Let's see how things are with the rating. The chart displays the rating horizontally, and the number of articles with this rating vertically.
The result is quite curious and unexpected for me. As you can see, articles on corporate blogs get higher ratings on average . This is especially evident in the "minus" articles that have a negative rating, individual authors have more of them. I think the reason is that for blogs they invite authors with already high ratings who write more or less high-quality texts. Plus, companies still have more technical resources to create interesting material (for example, individual authors will not review hardware because no one pays them for it).
But there is another side: if you look at the right side of the graph, you can see that among the articles with the highest rating (100 and above) there are still more individual authors:
In general, corporate blogs, on average, produce consistently high-quality material, but unique materials individual authors have more. But on average, I think there is also a draw here. The total score is 2: 2.
Comments
Here the result is, in principle, expected, articles of individual authors comment more. The number of articles horizontally, the number of comments vertically:
We expect the result IMHO because individual authors have more opportunities to write about something unusual, such as Tesla coils, lasers or electron microscopes; corporations will not deal with such topics. But the difference is, frankly, insignificant. Another fact was more surprising - about 1100 articles from individual authors and 1700 articles from corporate blogs have 0 comments, i.e. were either completely unnoticed, or there was, alas, nothing to comment on. On the opposite side of the distribution, the most commented article by the author mrtuxgot 2401 comments, and the most commented article from the blog vdsina_mgot 2028 comments.
One way or another, according to comments, individual authors are ahead, the score is 3: 2.
Number of views
A similar histogram can be made by the number of views:
Here I do not see any significant difference at all, it can be assumed that it is unimportant for readers who owns the article, an individual author or a blog. Again a draw, the final score is 4: 3.
Overall result: by and large, friendship won :) The difference in general is quite insignificant, both sides showed approximately equal results. But formally, individual authors are still a little ahead, which makes me happy as an author - there are still a lot of people doing something interesting in terms of a hobby.
Bonus
As a bonus, a couple of interesting patterns that were asked about in the comments and which I found interesting.
Publishing time
Everything is quite obvious, from corporate accounts more materials are published during working hours from 10 to 18, individual authors are more active in the evening and at night:
The situation is similar with the days of the week :
It is not surprising that there are more publications from individual authors on weekends.
Conclusion
To be honest, the results were somewhat surprising for me. I was sure that the content of corporate blogs would statistically be somewhere on the level of annoying advertisements during the film, and their ratings would be noticeably lower. Now I can honestly admit that I was wrong - in both cases, a lot of high-quality materials are published that are definitely worth reading.
I wish you all creative success.