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About Power 150

Published: August 03, 2007

The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It's really as simple as that, except that the name isn't strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.

It's now housed on Ad Age, partly because we thought it'd draw some traffic and links for us, but also because both Todd and Ad Age figured it was a useful service to rank and showcase all these sources of information in one place, where thousands of readers could discover them. With more than 700,000 registered users on our site and a host of daily and weekly products, we also hope we can grow the traffic to Todd's creation and some of the blogs it highlights.

What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it's already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd's own personal subjective measure. In the case of a tie, individual scores for a blog are weighted in the following order (from highest to lowest):

• Todd Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content as well as unique visual appearance and style. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.
  
  
• PostRank (1 to 50): PostRank is a service that measures the active engagement of your blog posts. By tracking sources such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, Google, RSS feed subscriptions, comments and page views (among other things), PostRank can measure how well your blog does on a post-by-post basis. We take a composite score of all your posts in the past 30 days and then scale it to provide a relative measure of how well you've been doing recently.
  
  
• Yahoo InLinks (1 to 20): Much like Technorati's InLinks count, Yahoo uses its Site Explorer to tabulate the number of links to a particular blog. We then scale this number down to a 30-point scale.
  
  
• Technorati Authority (1 to 10): Much like the InLinks count, Technorati's Authority count is the number of blogs (as opposed to individual links) that link to a particular blog. This number is then scale down to a 20-point scale.
  
  
• Technorati InLinks (1 to 10): Technorati tallies the number of links to a particular blog, and we then scale that number down to a 20-point scale.
  
  
• Alexa Points (1 to 15): Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). For the Power 150, we take that rank and assign it a proportional score between 1 and 15 and factor it into a blog's total score.
  
  
• Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 10): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 15) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
  
  
• Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.
  
  
• Collective Intellect (0 to 10): Collective Intellect is a social media analytics company that works with brands to evaluate consumer opinion, measure buzz, identify customer sentiment and manage corporate reputations at the industry, company, brand, campaign and messaging levels. For the Power 150, Collective Intellect's authority ranking uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate an author's authority on a topic, including such measures as link-analysis between on-topic posts, topic density, author's percent of contribution to the topic, number of comments and post quality.

As we said, credit for the idea and a lot of the hard work goes to Todd who is still responsible for assigning those Todd Points, and who is still interviewing the bloggers in the ranking for what he calls his Power Profiles. But Todd also gives a shout out to the Marcom Top 100, a Dutch-language blog ranking that inspired him. Ad Age and Todd would also like to give a great deal of credit to the TechBrew crew, which automated his original system enabling Todd, and now Ad Age, to maintain and expand the list of bloggers.

That's really easy. Just fill out this form and submit; we'll get you up there as soon as possible.

If you have a blog listed on the Power 150, you can let everyone know where you stand with our easy-to-use javascript badge. Just find your blog in the list, click its badge icon and copy and paste the code wherever you'd like. As the rankings fluctuate day-to-day, the number in the badge will be dynamically updated, so your readers can see where you're ranked each time they visit your site. If you're the modest type, you can also grab a generic badge that simply lets people know you're on the Power 150 without divulging your ranking.