I recently ran across a great article over at Modern Life Rubbish on Blogging Trends of of the Top 100 Blogs. Stuart Brown took the time to analyze Technorati’s top 100 blogs and distill their commonalties down to some rather useful info on laying out a readable, functional and successful blog. He also put together some totally hot charts which I hope he won’t mind if I borrow for illustrations sake. You'll be suprised at some of the things you'll learn, like having a white background may be necessity for success, font selection does matter and 79% of the top 100 blogs out there monetize themselves.

Blogging Platform:

What surprised me most is that 43% of the top blogs were built on custom blog platforms. That means that 43% of those top bloggers:

1: were technically savvy enough to build a platform of their own or modify an open source platform substantially enough to be considered custom. 

2: didn’t feel that the mainstream platforms like Blogger, WordPress , MoveableType or TypePad were functional or customizable enough to suit their needs.

Huh, so RSS Pieces is in good company when it comes to using a custom platform, who would have thunk?

Monetization:

Of all 100 top blogs, a full 79% were monetizing themselves. Not a big shocker to us over at RSS Pieces. These blogs obviously have traffic and know how to leverage that traffic into dollars. The most common tool was AdSense with a total of 24%. Other tools that rounded out the study were: Other, Federate Media and Blog Ads. I know there has been a lot of controversy surrounding monetization on real estate blogs, but these numbers should at least prove that successful blogs do indeed monetize themselves and AdSense must work if that is the poison most picked by successful bloggers. I mean, would TechCrunch really be using AdSense if it didn’t work?

Read also: Things Losers Say: AdSense and Affiliate Programs Don’t Work

And to dispel a rumor started by a competitor, this article was written in response to this article over on ProBlogger, a site we read and search daily.

Topic:

Most of the blog surveys you will read say that personal blogging is the most popular type of blogging out there, but just check out how focused the top 100 blog topics are. 54% of the top blogs are niche or topic specific that means that a topic as hot as real estate that is focused on a niche aspect of the industry or the community as a whole has a greater chance of gaining a posse that those dime a dozen personal experience blogs. Good to know, huh?

What’s another thing each of these top blogs has in common? The writing and topics are INTERESTING.

Read also: Killing me softly with your blog

Background color:

Oh, this is such a hot topic for me… WHITE is the most popular and most legible color for a background color. With 47% of top bloggers choosing white as their background color, you can see that it really does make a difference in the readability of your blog. You can soften up the font color and use something a little less harsh than a black but your background is best served being white. It makes using images found on stock photography sites blend into your site easier as most of them will have white backgrounds and it will help older and visually impaired visitors read your site more easily. There is simply nothing worse than finding a site with great content but having to squint or print it out to read it because the font is too small or the background too dark.

Font Faces:

Another hot topic for most web developers: there are only a handful of approved web fonts to choose from. I think every web developer will agree that going to a site that uses an unapproved web font (meaning a font not commonly installed on each and every computer regardless of OS) is a pet peeve. With the list of approved fonts being so small, the most common fonts used of top blogs are Verdana and Arial taking the lion’s share at a collective 65%. Other fonts found on these blogs were: Georgia, Trebuchet and Times.

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