Disney People: A Psychoanalysis

Bob gets inside your head and learns ... things

- by Bob McLain, January 25, 2011

Next time you're in a Disney Park, look around - not at the characters or the rides or the architecture; look, instead, at the people.

Most of those people are not Disney fans. They're Disney guests.

Is the difference important? Vital.

Think of Disney guests (all of them) as an orange. Squeeze the orange. Now think of the juice as Disney fans. Compared to the flesh, the rind, and the pits, the amount of juice in an orange isn't much. But for most bloggers, it's the juice that drives their traffic.

Earlier this month, I wrote an article called The Dilemma of the Disney Fan Site. In that article, I identified two types of Disney fan sites: interest-driven and event-driven. You may want to read it first, then come back. You'll enjoy this article more if you do.

Or let me summarize: an interest-driven Disney fan site is small because it draws only the comparatively few people with a serious and permanent desire to learn impractical information about Disney; an event-driven Disney fan site is large because it draws huge numbers of people with a serious but temporary need to learn practical information about Disney (their 'need' ends with the event, which of course is their Disney vacation).

That's enough to keep you afloat.

In this article, I want to categorize and then get inside the heads of the people who visit (and who create) the two types of Disney fan sites, offer an explanation of why it's so hard for interest-driven sites to gain substantial traffic, and finally suggest that for the typical Disney blogger traffic doesn't matter.

Let's start with this nifty graphic:

Disney Guests

For Disney, the only people who really matter are the guests, and they matter only in the aggregate. Each day, guests throng the Disney parks. They over-pay for food, lodging, souvenirs, everything. Then they leave, convinced they've had the best vacation of their lives, and start cogitatin' over how they'll be able to afford it again in a few years. But for now, they're done with Disney.

And by 'done with Disney' I mean they have little or no interest in reading Disney blogs. They're not interested in the innumerable 'takes' that innumerable bloggers post daily about Disney. For them, Disney is a vacation, not an addiction. Vacation ends, interest ends.

Some friends of mine - we'll call them the Antonellis - take their kids to Disney World every year. They are the quintessential Disney guests. As their vacation nears, they'll visit event-driven Disney sites like MouseSavers and AllEars to compile necessary information. That's all they need. Disney blogs are a waste of time.

For example, Jim Korkis writes great stories about Disney history, but can Jim Korkis get them 30% off the rack rate at the Polynesian?

If you're a Disney blogger, you can forget about the Antonellis.

You'll only draw the Antonellis with a site better than MouseSavers, better than AllEars, and creating such a site this late in the game will be difficult, maybe impossible. Actually, you can create a better site than MouseSavers or AllEars - better in terms of style and even structure - but you won't be able to position your new site as an equal to the older ones without investing big-time for what in the end would not be an appreciable pay-off.

So forget about the Antonellis.

Disney Fans

Line ten Disney guests in a row, push nine down, and shake heads with the guy still standing. Shake his head good and long because he's your audience, your only audience.

For a Disney fan, the trip doesn't end when the plane lifts off from Orlando airport. The trip never ends. A Disney fan doesn't have to be in a Disney park to have an interest in Disney. The interest started in childhood, most likely, and grew over the years. It's an interest that extends far beyond the latest discounts or the newest purloined menus.

Disney fans want to plunge their hands into corpus Mickey and massage his beating heart.

They can't, at least not while others are looking, so the next best thing is to read Disney blogs. Fans read Disney blogs - or, as I call them, interest-driven sites. Since there are so many Disney blogs vying for a slice of the same pie, very few Disney blogs generate much traffic. Compared to event-driven Disney sites, their traffic is miniscule. Worse, the traffic is typically driven by the same group of Disney fans.

Reading Disney Dispatch means you are a Disney fan. There's no other reason to be here.

You're not the Antonellis (who, by the way, don't even read Disney Dispatch, which has put an incredible strain on our friendship). You read Disney blogs for the pleasure of it. You have your favorites, too. As we'll see, that's a problem.

Disney Moguls

The rarest of the rare, a Disney mogul is someone who sets out to make his livelihood from Disney. The earliest moguls - those who launched AllEars, DISBoards, and similar sites - didn't set out to do anything but create an outlet for their Disney passion. But since they were the first, they grabbed market share without knowing they were grabbing market share, and now they're top-of-the-hill.

That's no longer the case. The market has solidified. Event-driven Disney fan sites are huge, both in terms of content and audience, and it's highly unlikely you'll be able to build one organically if you're just getting started now.

Since event-driven Disney fan sites are the only ones yielding significant income, the modern Disney mogul hopes to create a similar site - or a hybrid site combining the best of event- and interest-driven content. I can count the number of modern Disney moguls on both hands (one hand if you make me choose those likely to succeed).

If you run a Disney blog, and if you find a Disney mogul-in-training, your best bet is to ask him whether he'd like you to provide content for his site. Disney moguls focus on increasing their traffic through fair means and foul, and you can count on a traffic bump from links to your site from theirs.

As with Disney guests, however, we can generally ignore Disney moguls.

Disney Addicts

Disney addicts eat, sleep, blog Disney. Reading about Disney made them want to blog about Disney, and there they are, the owners of countless interest-driven Disney sites.

The Disney addict is both a super-fan and an anti-mogul. She's more than a fan because she doesn't just read about Disney, she writes about it; and she's less than a mogul because she realizes that she's not going to become rich from a Disney blog.

Disney addicts are evenly split between those who blog about Disney in general and those who blog about a particular Disney niche. The latter type of addict often creates the coolest sites. If you look, you can find gorgeous Disney niche sites about the Haunted Mansion, the Jungle Cruise, Disney typography, and hundreds of other things with ridiculously narrow appeal. These sites, of course, risk running out of fresh material. Many do, and stop. Their audience, obviously, is limited to Disney fans who share the blogger's special interest. That's a major limitation. But it's also irrelevant because the Disney 'niche' blogger cares less than any other type of blogger about traffic.

The larger group of Disney addicts are generalists. They blog about whatever Disney is doing (or has done) that captures their interest. Theoretically, their audience should be larger, but in many cases the scatter-shot approach brings in people who might like one article but none of the others. Those people won't stick around. A niche blogger, on the other hand, has a very 'sticky' audience.

Traffic: The Grail of Disney Fan Sites

Unfortunately, we're all judged by objective criteria. Blogs are judged not so much by their content but by their traffic. The argument goes: if your content is so good, you'll have lots of traffic, but your traffic is low, and so your content must not be so good, bye-bye.

There is no cure. A blog that seems to have lots of readers, that has lots of comments, that spawns lots of tweets, will draw new readers more easily than the blog written by some schmuck who writes every day but never draws a single comment or a single tweet.

Does it matter? It should not matter.

If you spring from bed each morning eager to write a new article for your Disney blog, you have succeeded. You're not going to become rich (or even self-sufficient) from an interest-driven Disney fan site. So forget the traffic. Use the blog to improve your writing skills, to make new friends, to learn more about Disney, to elevate yourself above the level of mere Disney 'guest'.

Do all that and you've succeeded. Traffic be damned.

Inertia: The Bane of Disney Fan Sites

That's all quite fascinating, Bob, you say - but I gotta have more traffic, no matter what, and how does knowing the audience help me draw more people to my Disney fan site?

Check out this common scenario:

You look at Google Analytics and you can't understand why your blog has gone flat-line after an initial upward surge. You write every day. Every so often, somebody leaves a comment for one of your articles and says it's pretty darn good.

What's the problem?

Inertia.

People are creatures of habit. Every day, over breakfast, I visit the same handful of sites to read the news and indulge in my various interests. I rarely add new sites to the mix.

I visit hundreds of Disney blogs (and non-Disney sites with Disney content) daily to compile the Hullabaloo. Most of the time, I only glance at the stuff on those sites. Even if I wanted to read everyone's Disney blog, I wouldn't have the time. I read very few Disney blogs. But they've become part of my routine. Even if I find an amazing new Disney blog, it still has to overcome inertia: the force stopping me from going back to it day after day, like a robot.

And that's the problem. How to turn your blog into a ballistic missile capable of piercing the natural inertia of incoming visitors who might like it but who may not ever return.

Come back February 1 for the next article in this series: 'Taking Your Disney Blog Ballistic'.

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