Friday, February 18, will my last day as a HubPages staffer.  You will still see me in the forums but I will no longer have the official H on my profile photo.  Also, I will no longer be posting my occasional “Larry’s Random Thoughts” in the HubPages blog.  This post is the last one before I leave.

I joined HubPages in June of 2008.  At that time, HubPages had just launched its Yieldbuild Ad Optimization technology.  There was excitement in the air as the company attempted to duplicate its success with HubPages in a new space.  Because many of the existing team would be transferring to this other project, they were hiring engineers and marketing folks to work on the HubPages side of the business.  One month earlier, they hired Fawntia Fowler;  Maddie Ruud was already on board as the community manager, Paul Deeds was staying as General Manager of HubPages, and then there was me. Next came Ryan Hupfer as the Director of Awesomeness.  I still smile when I remember the job title that Ryan chose, the giant HubPages business cards he handed out at conferences, and his blog posts on a street performer who was performing just outside the HubPages office.  James Edmondson was doing design work for both HubPages and the new Yieldbuild project.  Paul Edmondson stayed active in both HubPages and Yieldbuild.

Some of the HubPages Team and InspirePub in 2008

HubPages was #250 on Quantcast then.  For those who aren’t familiar with Quantcast, this ranking is based on the number of unique visitors who come to HubPages from the US.  I remember that a few months later, with roughly 200,000 Hubs, HubPages was attracting 8 million unique visits world wide.

One very special part of being on the HubPages staff is the great interactions with the Hubbers.  I remember when inspirepub visited the HubPages office right after I had first started.  She wrote a Hub about her visit and included the picture above.  DJ Funktual wrote a staff care package for each Hub staffer. More recently, wordscribe43 has noticed similarities between Hub staffers and famous celebrities.  I also enjoyed this year’s April Fool’s post by James.

The HubPages Community has always been great about providing suggestions and feedback for existing features.  The categories in their current form are based on feedback from the community.  Fawntia wrote the tools for implementing the categories.  I took the lead on coming up with the initial list and getting feedback.  I started out with two levels of categories and then Paul Deeds said that two levels was a good start.  Can break down each subcategory into a list of smaller subcategories?  That eventually led to over 6,000 categories.  Ryan identified me with categories so he took a bunch of pictures of me in a red shirt.  Ryan, Cam Edmondson, and James Edmondson were the one responsible for the “Larry” graphics if you have ever seen those.  The move toward categories went against some of the thinking at the time.  Many people asked me if I had read Clay Shirky’s classic criticism of categories.  After enough people brought it up, I wrote a response as one of Larry’s random thoughts.

Paul Edmondson is always trying to figure out how to improve the Hubber experience. He loves to meet with staffers and bounces ideas off them.  One of these ideas led to the Hub Feed.  This feature was a response to Hubbers who wanted Hubtivity to be more interactive.  I really think that Fawntia knocked the ball out of the ballpark with the feed.  It is a gem that greatly improves the ability to follow the changes that occur across HubPages.  It was featured in a TechCrunch article about HubPages.

Gosh, it amazes me how many different capsules that were added during the last two years:  amazon capsule, updated text capsule, quiz capsule, poll capsule, code capsule, map capsule, and table capsule.

We had a celebration inside the office on October 28, 2009, when HubPages shot up to #100 on Quantcast.  Just a month before, we had hit the milestone of 500,000 Hubs published.  The relationship between these events was not a coincidence.  I wrote a blog post in July, 2009 where I had compared the relationship between number of unique visitors and the number of hubs published.

2010 was a big year for HubPages.  We celebrated our 4th year birthday.  That team of 5 was now a team of 23.  A new HubPages awning and sign have been added to headquarters in San Francisco.  HubPages is now #46 on Quantcast with over 36 million unique visitors each month to the site and over 10,000 likes on Facebook.  We now have over 1 million Hubs published.  Paul Edmondson has recently begun telling the business story behind HubPages which I am looking forward to following.  HubPages was chosen Best of the Web by Family Magazine.

The 4th Year Birthday Party for HubPages

The event that really showed how much HubPages is growing as a company was when Robin Edmondson organized the first HubCamp in San Francisco on October 6, 2010.  It was a great evening.  Attending the event were many of the current Hub staff: Simone Smith, Ren Chin, the VP of Marketing, Jason Menayan, the Director of Marketing, who had done HubPages marketing before Ryan came on, Paul Deeds, Mausmi Deeds, Norah Casey, Maddie Ruud, Paul Edmondson, a large number of Hubbers, and a few members of the Google Ad Sense team.  Robin was masterful in her presentation and the number of HubCamps that have followed are testament to that first event.  It was a great opportunity to meet Hubbers face to face.  For example, I got to chat with Urban Farm Girl who wrote this Hub about the event.

I want to end this post by thanking the people who are most responsible for HubPages’s success: the Hubber Community!  Thank you very much for publishing so many high quality Hubs, for your requests, your questions, your comments, and your feedback!  HubPages will only continue to thrive if the Hubber Community remains active!  HubPages has always been about its community. 

With this installment of HubPages Behind the Scenes, HubPages’ very own Larry Freeman shares his experience with creating and working on the HubPages iPhone app!  If you listen carefully enough, you can hear Ren in the background

If you don’t already have our fabulous iPhone app (which, BTW, is totally free), you can download it here.

Also, you might be interested in a more detailed walkthrough of the current iPhone app features that Larry shared earlier on the HubPages blog, and you might also like to have a peek at Appceletator’s Titanium software development kit that Larry mentions in our interview.

As you’ll see in the interview, Larry is already hard at work on some awesome new features that shall come to the app soon, so keep checking back- plenty of awesomeness is in store.

I remember when I first started using the web in the early 90′s.  Web sites were quite ugly with blinking text, slapped together images, and unstyled text. But in those days, we weren’t too bothered by that.  There was an excitement about the possibilities of all the information that could soon be available on the web.  With the slowness of modem connections at the time, I thought that article-based web sites (or online magazines as I would have said then) was where the action was going to be.

I guess looking back, I was pretty naive not to see that broadband was inevitable and the web was not going to be a great repository of articles but an active social network.  I had thought that urls were too nerdy and would prevent nontechnical folks from using the internet directly rather than going through a more user-friendly website such as AOL or at the time, Prodigy.

I wasn’t completely wrong about the impact of article-based web sites.  The print media today seems close to extinction unless it can reinvent itself online.

I thought that Clay Shirky wrote a very interesting essay about the future of TV and I think that his observations apply equally well to the print media:

The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!)  That minute has been watched by more people than the viewership of American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl combined.  (174 million views and counting.)

Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecosystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken.  Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways.  “Charlie Bit My Finger” was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera.  No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it.  Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers.  A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.

Wikipedia has demonstrated the force that article-based web sites can have. It has also demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing as an important source of content creation. Recently, Huffington Post has been attracting lots of attention as it has risen rapidly in traffic and readership.

Nothing to my mind speaks better to the changing state of the print media than a list of the top article-based sites.  The list below is based on US unique visitors as estimated by Quantcast. I am also excluding sites that do not focus primarily on articles such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Microsoft.

Here’s the top 20 list for June 18, 2010:

1. Wikipedia (75M)
2. Blogspot (58M)
3. Blogger.com (52M)
4. Answers.Com (47M)
5. About.Com (45M)
6. eHow (44M)
7. WordPress (30M)
8. Huffington Post (26M)
9. imdb (21M)
10. cnn.com (20M)
11. webmd (18M)
12. Associated Content (16M)
13. NYTimes.com (15M)
14. cnet.com (15M)
15. bbc.co.uk (15M)
16. tmz.com (15M)
17. people.com (14M)
18. HubPages (13M)
19. WashingtonPost.com (13M)
20. examiner.com (13M)

A list like this is a bit deceiving.  NYT owns about.com, Associated Content is owned by Yahoo, and Blogger consists of both Blogspot (for readers) and Blogger (for writers). It also doesn’t tell you which sites are on the rise, on the decline, or staying roughly in the same spot. Still, it is very interesting to note the new names that are appearing along side the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, People, and CNN.

I think it is appropriate to end this blog post with one more quote from Clay Shirky in the same article that I quoted before:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to.  It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old.  But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

One of the fun parts of my job is talking to people about HubPages who have never heard of it.  This is not so surprising considering that if you read most articles on social media, crowdsourcing, blogging, or social networking, HubPages is rarely mentioned.  If you check the Quantcast 100, most of the websites there are well-known names: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.  This makes sense.  These are giant sites and most of their visitors are either members or customers actively using the site’s services.  The most popular sites are for the most part: large and well-established.

For most of these sites, their users and their visitors are pretty much the same people. For HubPages, this is not the case. Most of our visitors will never sign into HubPages and they probably won’t register.  According to Quantcast, HubPages gets visited each month by approximately 20 million unique visitors.  Of this 20 million, roughly 160,000 logged in and did something on HubPages.  Just to be clear, that means that our members represents only 0.8%  of our visitors.

While 160,000 is a number to be very proud of, it is not a giant number.  These 160,000 people were responsible for roughly 55,000 hubs published and roughly 80,000 forum posts on approximately 3500 topics.  That’s a healthy amount of activity.  And yet, these numbers are quite small in relation to giant web sites out there.

Facebook, which is quite open about its numbers, has 400 million active users, 60 million status updates each day, and 5 billion pieces of content shared each week.  I mention a giant like Facebook to point out how small HubPages is in comparison.  And yet, if we judge by U.S. traffic, Facebook is has only 12 times the reach of HubPages (as measured in terms of US unique visitors: 124 million for Facebook compared to 11 million for HubPages) even though their output is more than 1,000-fold greater than the output at HubPages.

Being able to get even this close to Facebook is a big deal.  HubPages is currently ranked #89 in the U.S.

Still, my point is that in terms of the top-100 web sites, the size of the HubPages is still relatively small.  Those 55,000 hubs were published by 15,385 different people and the 80,000 forum postings came from 2,398 different people.  If we define an active user as someone who writes at least one hub a month or makes at least one post in the forum, then in the last 30 days, the number of active users was 16,242.  These 16,000+ were responsible for all the hubs created and all the posts in the forums.

Supporting these 16,000 follks are 14 HubPages staff.  When I started at HubPages almost 2 years ago, there were only 4 people listed on the HubPages About page.  I was #4 (after Paul Deeds, Maddie Ruud, and Fawntia Fowler).  I mention this only to show that HubPages is still a small web site.

I am not sure at what point a web site becomes a  medium-sized site.  We have over 700,000 hubs at present.  At the rate we are growing, we will have over a million in less than a year.  It may be when we hire employee #50 or employee #100.  But when it happens, I have no doubt, that I will be a bit nostalgic for the present time when our active community is small and our reach is rapidly growing.

Just last year, an article in Forbes.Com attracted lots of attention with its criticism of Crowdsourcing.

“Crowdsourcing” refers to the phenomenon of opening up a web site to the public and seeing what happens.  The term was invented by Jeff Howe in 2006 who used it to describe popular web sites such as Wikipedia and iStockPhoto.

The article in Forbes titled “The Myth of Crowdsourcing” was written by Dan Woods.  While he acknowledges that crowdsourcing can be very successful (the $1 million dollar Netflix Prize, Wikipedia, and Open Source software), he believes that the success in these examples comes from highly motivated individuals and that the crowd for the most part is irrelevant:

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing.  There are only virtuosos, usually, uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field.  Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure.  From their fervent brains spring new ideas.  The crowd has nothing to do with it.  The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

Dan believes that the same is true for content sites such as Wikipedia:

Wikipedia seems like a good example of a crowd of people who have created a great resource. But at a conference last year I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how articles were created.  He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual.  After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people.  Some articles are indeed group creations that evolved out of a sentence or two.  But if you took away all of the articles that were individual creations, Wikipedia would have very little left.

So, is Dan correct?  Is crowdsourcing, as it is popularly understood, dead wrong?

In my view, to properly evaluate crowdsourcing, it is necessary to look at it from the perspective of the organization that supports it.  Netflix wanted innovation beyond what it could get in-house.  So, it offered $1 million dollars to anyone who could beat its experts by 10%.

Wikipedia began originally as a Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia whose content was “written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.”  Wikipedia was the side project that was meant to be a “feeder” project for Nupedia.

My point is that crowdsourcing is not about crowd collaboration as much as it is about opening up content to the general public using web technologies.  The alternative to crowdsourcing is going in-house for content or if you go to the public, then you make sure that an “editor” or a “publisher” is the gatekeeper before content is accepted.  Crowdsourcing in the case of both Netflix and Wikipedia occurred as an alternative to the standard, “in-house approach”.

Crowdsourcing, then, is really about opening up a process to anyone who wants to participate.  Sure, much of the content will not be as high in quality as the “in-house” method but more importantly, people who were previously outside the system can now participate.

Dan admits that the main reason for his opinion piece is that he doesn’t want people to lose sight of the importance of individuals:

So what’s my problem?  Why does it bug me that people think crowdsourcing is something it is not?  Why do I care that people think a crowd is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor.  We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail.  A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of investors on the cheap.

I am very glad that Dan wrote this.  I believe that this is a very important point.  Crowdsourcing works best when we recognize it as an opportunity for authors and contributors to “explore, play and fail”.  Indeed, crowdsourcing fails when we lose sight of the individuals that make it up or the great effort required in filtering out the best content.

To be clear, the “crowd” for me is synonymous with “out-of-house” content.

That’s why, in my opinion, the crowd is key to the innovation and quality of crowdsourced content.  If you knew ahead of time who would be providing all the value, then there would be no need for crowdsourcing:  you could do it all in-house.  But of course, you never know such things.  A web site, such as HubPages, open to the “crowd”, is the best way for the nonfamous to show their stuff.

Teenagers are blogging significantly less now than they were four years ago. At least, that’s one interpretation from a recent study done by the Pew Internet Project.

Here are the facts cited by the study:

• Only 14% of 12-17 years-olds report that they blog today versus 25% in 2006.
• Only 52% report that they comment on blogs versus more than 3/4 in 2006.

In contrast to this, social networking is on the rise:

• 73% of wired teens are using social networking versus 55% in 2006

It is always good to take statistics with a healthy dose of caution.  ReadWriteWeb, for example, has suggested that these numbers may have more to do with the rise of Facebook (no blogging)  and the decline in popularity of MySpace (has blogging) among teens.  They propose that “it’s possible that teens weren’t ever really into blogging to begin with.”

If you check out the Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, it is clear that teen bloggers are not a significant part of the blogging population:

• 95% are 18 and older
• 60% are 18 – 44
• 75% of bloggers have college degrees

At HubPages, for example, you have to be 18 or older to open a HubPages account.

But, there is another number that is worth considering: rate of traffic growth over the last year.  Using quantcast.com as a source:

• WordPress US traffic growth has been roughly flat (World traffic has grown by roughly 25%)
• TypePad US traffic growth has been roughly flat (World traffic has also been roughly flat)
• Blogspot traffic has grown by roughly 40%

Now, compare this with the crowdsourced information sites such as HubPages and Squidoo over the past year:

• HubPages US traffic growth has been roughly 100% (World traffic has also been roughly 100%)
• Squidoo US traffic growth has been roughly 100% (World traffic has also been roughly 100%)

While these numbers just scratch the surface, it will be very interesting to see if these numbers hold over the next year.

So, is blogging on the decline?  I don’t think I’ve cited enough data to answer this question one way or another.

Still, there is one big trend that is unmistakable:  for easy public communcation, blogging is no longer the only game in town.

I was recently reading a Wired article that profiled a company called Demand Media.

The company is one of many companies that are seeking to become a “content factory”.  Their goal is to automate the production of web content that is carefully targeted to capture the most high value traffic from the search engines.  Both answers.com and aol.com, for example, are going after similar models.

Demand Media makes two boasts:  4,000 pieces of content a day and algorithm for identifying topics for authors to write about.  Peter Kafka has recently noted that Demand Media is probably more valuable than the New York Times.

How much content does it take to be considered a thriving content factory?  According to a recent profile from ReadWriteWeb, here are some numbers from the most popular content sites:

wikipedia.org: 56,000,000

answers.com: 37,700,000

nytimes.com: 13,200,000

washingtonpost.com: 12,500,000

ehow.com (owned by Demand Media): 4,850,000

huffingtonpost.com: 4,740,000

I am in no way trying to imply the sites such the NY Times, Washington Post, or Wikipedia are comparable to the content factories.  I bring it up to show how rapidly the content factories are growing.  Michael Arrington has written an interesting post about how the content factories may indicate the decline of “hand-crafted content”

I write all this to compare the content factory approach with the approach that we have embraced at HubPages: what I would term the ‘content community’ approach.

Rather than a factory environment where content is owned by the host site, we provide a crowdsourced environment where the copyright stays with the author.  The author is not limited to a one-time fee for writing content but is entitled to monthly payments based on the ad revenue generated by the pages written (60% of ad revenue generated by an article goes to the author).

Can the community model compete with the factory model in terms of output?  In December 2009, hubbers produced 40,892 hubs.  That’s 1,319 hubs a day on average.  That’s after we unpublished hubs that violated our terms of use.  That number has been on the rise in recent months.  In January 2009, just for comparison, hubbers produced 17,544 hubs (or, 565 hubs a day on average).

Are HubPages hubs higher quality than the content factory articles?  It’s definitely our goal to keep raising the quality standards at HubPages.  Hubscore has gone a long way in promoting quality.  I think that we can do more.

I bring all this up because even if the content factories are starting to get lots of attention, I think that the future lies with content communities.  I believe that ultimately authors will want to retain the copyright for their best stuff.  It is always more fun and rewarding to be part of a community rather than a cog on a wheel that turns according to a master algorithm.

To be fair, eHow, which is owned by Demand Media, operates as a content community so it is quite possible that in the long run, Demand Media will move more in this direction.

Additionally, its questionable whether the content factories will be able to keep up their current search traffic levels.  John Battelle believes that Google will be working hard to put a stop on their influence.  John believes that “2010 is going to be a very interesting year.”

Today HubPages crossed the milestone of 500,000 hubs.

It wasn’t so long ago that I was talking about the 200,000 hub milestone.  But what a difference, a year makes.  Back then, we were getting 8 million unique visitors a month.  Today, we are getting over 14 million.

The 500,000th hub in case you were wondering was Do I have a Cold, Flu, or H1N1 by one2recognize2.

So, who created the other 499,999 hubs?

Over 751,000 people have signed up for HubPages.  As you may have figured out, many of those who signed up haven’t yet written a hub.  That’s pretty normal for an active web site.  In fact, most of those 751,000 are still holding off on their first hub.  Only 97,848 people have published hubs.

This suggests that the average active user on HubPages publishes roughly 5 hubs.  But I would suggest holding off on that judgment.  Averages can be misleading.

stendek, the most prolific hubber at present, has published 3,482 hubs.  If you look at the hubbers who have obtained a hub score of 100, the most prolific is Patty Inglish, MS with 953 published hubs.   If you look at authors by the number of fans, the author with the most fans is Maddie Ruud with 2,504 fans and 219 hubs.

There are 6 authors who have published more than 1000 hubs.  There are 34 who have published more than 500 and 461 who have published more than 100.

These folks are tilting the scales.  That’s why the average is as high as 5 hubs.

There are over 54,000 hubbers that have only written 1 hub and over 82,000 that have written 5 or less.  That means that over 350,000 of the 500,000 hubs were published by only 15% of the total published authors.  If you’ve written more than 5 hubs, then you are part of this select group.

You might be suprised that so few are responsible for so many of the hubs but this is a typical pattern on the web.  It’s known as the Power Law or the 80-20 rule.  It means roughly that the second most productive person usually does about 1/2 as much as the most producive person, the third most productive usually does about 1/3 as much, and so on.  If you are interested, the power law has been well described by Clay Shirky.

To our published authors, thanks for all your hard work!  HubPages is growing rapidly.  If we keep the quality up, then the traffic and readership will surely follow.  Great job!

Today’s blog is an update from a previous blog.  Back then (8 months ago), we had 8 million visitors and 200,000 hubs and I wondered if the ratio of 40 unique visitors per hub would last.  It didn’t.  Our current ratio is 32 unique visitors per hub.

Writing a blog or a hub is a lot like fishing.  The bait (hopefully) is the quality content of your site.  Your best chance of finding a nice fishing hole comes from finding a place with the most fish in relation to the least fishermen.  This in essence is the justification for analyzing web sites by their ratio of unique visitors to content.

Let’s look at some popular web sites to see how their ratio compares with HubPages.  WordPress has a total of 115M blog posts published and gets 189.7M unique visitors each month so it’s ratio of about 2  Squidoo has nearly 900,00 lenses and gets 10.4M unique visitors.  Rounding up, that’s almost a ratio of 12.  Associated Content says that they have more than 1.4M published articles and gets 21.6 monthly unique visitors.  That’s a ratio of 15.4.  So, based on these sites, I think that a ratio of 32 is pretty good.

Let’s look at the rate of growth of our visitors over the last year:

It is interesting that one year ago, HubPages had roughly 7.1 million unique visitors worldwide.  Now, we have the same amount in the US.  If we were to repeat that trend, then by next year, we would have 13.3M visitors in the US which would make us (using the current numbers from Quantcast), the 48th most popular web site in the US (we are currently #123).

If we look at a graph of our content creation before we hit our 400,000 hubs milestone, we see the following:

Not surprisingly, this graph shows that the rate of growth of total hubs published outstripped the rate of growth of the visitors.

Will current trends continue over the next year?  Will HubPages become a top 100 destination in the US?  Will it become a top 200 destination world wide?  We at HubPages hope that this is the case.

For those interested in tracking the current number of hubs on HubPages, we now have a page with the current stats.

With the latest update to HubPages, we have added the ability to reuse an existing hub layout for a new hub. in addition to providing two additional starting layouts.   Here’s a snapshot of the new layout selection:

The new feature gives you the ability to create a template hub.  By this, I mean a hub that is not necessarily published but which you can reuse for each new hub you create.   If you start your template title with an !, then you can be sure that it will be at the top of the drop down list.  This will make it very easy to select when you create a new hub and it will also separate your template from your regular hubs.  For example, you could title your template !My-hub-template.

Templates are nice because you can change them at any time and because  you can have a different template for each style of hub that you like you write.

So, what is the ideal layout?  Should hubs try to be as complicated as possible or should they purposely stay simple?  In my view, a hub should always be as simple as possible.  In my view and in my experience with well-written hubs (mostly, as reader), the content is key.  Content should drive the layout.

Let’s take a look at the different layout usage patterns on HubPages.  If we look at all hubs without regard to quality, here’s what we find:

• There are over 68,000 different layouts in use on HubPages (out of 310,000 published hubs)
• over 84,500 hubs use the default layout (Text -> Photo -> Comments)
• over 8,000 hubs use (Text/Photo -> Comments)
• over 5,900 hubs use (Text -> Comments)

If you only consider hubs that have a Hub Score of 80 or more, then you get some different values:

• There are about 7,500 hubs with a Hub Score of 80 or more (at the time of my test)
• There are over 5,800 different hub layouts used by these hubs
• Roughly 300 of these hubs are written with (Text -> Photo -> Comments)
• Roughly 170 of these hubs are written with (Text/Photo -> Comments)
• Roughly 50 of these hubs are written with (Text -> Comments)

I think that the lesson here is that the best hubs use a layout appropriate for the content rather than the starting layout.  Given the great number of different layouts, I think it is also interesting to see which capsules are being used and how many of them are found in each hub.

If we look at at the hubs created this year, we find that the average hub uses:

• 1.78 Text capsules
• 1.54 Photo capsules
• 0.96 Comment capsules
• 0.32 Amazon capsules
• 0.27 Link capsules
• 0.27 Video capsules
• 0.11 Ebay capsules
• 0.09 Rss capsules
• 0.07 News capsules
• 0.07 Poll capsules

Now, if we look at what types of capsules are being used by hubs with a Hub Score of 80 or more, we find that the average hub contains:

• 4.92 Text capsules
• 3.77 Photo capsules
• 0.99 Comment capsules
• 0.90 Amazon capsules
• 0.83 Link capsules
• 0.73 Video capsules
• 0.21 Ebay capsules
• 0.23 News capsules
• 0.15 Rss capsules
• 0.27 Poll capsules

I think that the lesson is clear.  The higher rated hubs have a more interesting selection of capsules.  Indeed, if you compare the two sets of numbers, the higher rated hubs have roughly double the number of each type of capsule.

If we only want to look at the hubs that reached the coveted 90 hub score, here’s what you find:

• There are 525 different layouts (for roughly 590 hubs with a score of 90 or more)
• Of these, roughly 13 used Text/Photo -> Comments
• Only 11 used Text -> Photo -> Comments

Of these top-rated, the average hub used:

• 4.77 Text capsules
• 5 Photo capsules
• 0.97 Amazon capsules
• 1.00 Comment capsules
• 0.37 Link capsules
• 0.61 Video capsules
• 0.27 Ebay capsules
• 0.33 News capsules
• 0.11 Rss capsules
• 0.25 Poll capsules

Again, I think this proves the point.  If you want do well, find a layout that best promotes your content.