One of my favourite bloggers is The Sartorialist, who posts photographs of prettily-dressed people he sees on the street—street fashion, basically. His blog has become pretty popular over the last year, and both GQ and style.com have paid him to do his thing in different cities for their sites. (Usually associated with one fashion week or another.)

You might think that a featured blog on such sites would attract a lot of hits and a lot comments, but with respect to comments at least, this is not the case! Posts to The Sartorialist regularly attract 20 or 30 comments, but there doesn’t seem to be any post on style.com with more than 10 comments. Why is this? Even the Sartorialist himself, Scott Schuman, can’t get people to register: in a recent post, he almost pleads with people to post comments to Style.com (!) (“i know it is a pain to register but I’d love to hear what shots you guys are liking”). In response, readers posted comments about the photos on his style.com blog to The Sartorialist, and complained that they didn’t like the “feel” of his style.com blog.

Some of their comments are revealing:

Strangely enough, it feels much more intimate to participate in these conversations on your blog; commenting on style.com seems so much more public. Even though you may attract the same audience in both spots, a discussion here about (say) the length of someone’s shirt sleeves has an academic feel, while the same discussion in a “public,” commercial forum tends to feel more like a personal attack on the photo’s subject. Or maybe it’s the feeling that the attention to detail that is so captivating and informative here can seem a bit obsessive in the public forum. Given the size of your audience here, the difference may be illusory, but for me, at least, it is significant. Anyway, just a thought. I love seeing the pictures wherever they’re posted — it is just the character of the commenter’s discussions that seems to be affected.

Can you repost the link to your blog on Style.com? I’ve been to the site twice and I can’t seem to find it.

i agree with the other commenters. there’s something more intimate about here - you’ve really managed to cultivate a community. also, i have to remember to log in at style.com… and it shows my username, in which i inadvertently mistakenly included my name… anyway.

Why is resistance so strong? Is it hard to register on style.com? Are readers more comfortable with his old blog? Is style.com too commercial, too overbearing, too difficult to navigate?

Is any commercial, highly branded site having any success with reader interaction? The Washington Post allows comments on many of their articles, but the (as of now) most popular article on the site has 5 comments, the second most popular has 16, and the 3rd most popular has 1. Each of these articles must be read by tens of thousands of people—why do they not comment?

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