I am thankful to my idol Mr. Daniel Scocco for conceptualising this wonderful contest named "Blogging Idol" where winner will be the one who gains most number of new RSS subscribers in the 30 days period. Daniel, you have always been creative, and Blogging Idol contest is yet another example of it.
I liked the idea, because it is going to be a win win for everyone; the participants will get some motivation, will get to know 
about some less popular but great blogs, and don’t forget the linklove. It will be a good linkbait for Daniel too. Whilst I think it is a wonderful opportunity for me, I am still skeptical about it’s fairness and logic.
The whole idea is to increase our RSS subscribers by white hat techniques. Also, an important clause states that only those bloggers are allowed who have a subscribers count of less than 1,000. Well, that makes me eligible as I have zero subscribers at the moment.
So, what makes it unfair?
Those participants who have subscribers count around in the range of 500-1000 at the start of competition will enjoy some undue advantage. They can easily jump to 700-800 in 30 days by applying simple techniques (of course whitehat). I won’t talk about the tehniques but it is clear that established blogs will have advantage right from the start.
On the other side, new bloggers like me will have hard time jumping from zero to the likes of 100ish or 200ish count. No, I am not complaining, I am going to participate happily in even in the current format any ways.
Some people would suggest to count on percentage increase instead of absolute numbers, it does make sense at first, but on second look we get to know that gives unfair advantage to the blogs with low subscriber count. And what about those with zero initial count? calculating percentage increase will be impossible in those cases.
And what makes it illogical?
Subscribers isn’t the only metric for a successful blog (or blogger); we all know that. Gaining subscribers in entertainment niche is a cakewalk, while it’s very hard in Make Money Online niche. There will be no restriction on the niches in the competition I hope, and that makes the criteria of ‘Subscriber Gain’ a bit illogical.
Ok enough, tell me the solution.
Now you are talking, one solution I would suggest is that the winner should be chosen based on three factors.
Factor 1. Absolute increase in subscribers count.
Factor 2. Community voting
Factor 3. Daniel’s vote
Daniel himself is a part of community then why give more weight to his vote? You may ask. Well, Daniel will be the one who will be regulating and tracking the participant blogs more closely. So his vote deserves more weight.
Let me show you an example:
Let’s assume there are three participants.
| S.No. | Factors | Points |
| 1 | Absolute increase in count | 100 |
| 2 | Community voting | 70 |
| 3 | Daniel’s vote | 30 |
The highest increase in count gets 100 points straight away, ABC gets it in this case. And points for others can be easily calculated with respect to the highest increase in count. Like XYZ’s gained 200 subscribers which is half of ABC’s, so he gets 50 points. At the end of 30 days period community will vote based on the 150 words weekly mails from participants and also by analysing their blogs over the time.
Result:
| Blogger | Factor 1 | Factor 2 | Factor 3 | Total | Remarks |
| XYZ | 50 | 40 | 25 | 115 | He did well, claps! |
| PQR | 75 | 50 | 25 | 150 | The next Blogging Guru |
| ABC | 100 | 25 | 10 | 135 | Good techniques, but slightly greyish. |
PQR is the winner, although his absolute increase in count is less than that of ABC. In this case Daniel and the community had probable seen that ABC’s techniques were not in good taste.
So, we have the real winner Mr. PQR, my heartiest congrats to him.
But, One Problem:
- Community voting is only possible if they analyse and read all the blogs over the competition period, is it feasible if we get 50+ competitors?. But, one can argue that it’s participants own responsibility to draw people’s attention, whoever gets succeeded in doing it will surely get more votes.
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Sorry for making it a lot more complex but I hope it makes the contest more fair and less prone to get Gamed. Let’s see how it goes.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
I understand your point. Also, I think that there are bloggers with more than 1000, but they’ve created a blog just for the competition. The thing is that they could be promoting that blog in their blogs, getting a lot of referrals in few days. I saw a counter (in the first day) with 30 reader and the next day it had 80.
However, you need to relax and enjoy the competition. You should see it as a motivation to get more subscribers, everybody will take advantages of this contest.