The carnivals I’ve hosted mostly fall in the OK category, probably. Nothing great, but nothing excessively lazy either.

Hosting a carnival does get you some extra traffic regardless of quality. Having said that, the amount of residual traffic you get after the week is over will depend a lot on the quality. The fantastic ones will be linked to long after they’re posted initially (like in the present post). The really bad ones will be remembered too (maybe you can recall a really poorly done Carnival of Personal Finance). And the average ones are just there.

One pressure in putting up a fantastic carnival is that you’re getting many of your posts the night or two before, so the design of the carnival has to be such that you can put it together quickly.

Anyway … here’s a question whose answer is implied in the original post:

Does a plain carnival generate less traffic for the submitters than a great one?

I don’t think the answer is clear. (Has anyone measured this in some way?) A successful carnival is more than just a polished look, clever design, gimmick, superhuman effort, etc. At the end of the day, the successful ones will be the ones that drive the most traffic to the posts in the carnival. I think the plain vanilla carnivals might actually be better than ones with a lot of commentary by the host. If the host gives away the punch line for a post, there’s no reason for visitors to read the post for themselves!

It’s for this reason that I’m not against lists of links. (Though I probably could categorize the links in my future carnivals.) Short “so-and-so posts lah-dee-dah at bloggy-blog” or embellishments on this theme reveal none of the content of the post to the reader — which encourages them to read the article if it interests them. Mission accomplished, as far as I’m concerned. If I entertain or wow people, great. But if I do it at the expense of the posters, then I’ve done them a disservice.

At the risk of overpromising, I encourage you to submit to this week’s Carnival of Investing. Hopefully I’ll make it worth your while.

Honestly, as a complete newbie to hosting carnivals, I wasn’t sure what leeway I had to work with. I didn’t include one submission that was completely unrelated to investing, but I didn’t much care for a couple of them that didn’t present (in my opinion) any interesting content at all.

It would help if we had some clearer guidelines for hosts, like “be choosy in accepting every submission” or “feel free to leave out poorly-written articles”. For people who are new to blogging/carnivals, it can be intimidating to decide not to include X because it was poorly written, or Y because it was included in three other finance carnivals this same week, especially if X and Y are older, more established blogs than yours. (Of course, the solving the latter problem requires some coordination of efforts across carnival hosts, too.)

I did read every submission and tagged each one with relevant keywords and a brief explanation of what the article was about, instead of just cutting and pasting. I also listed them in their categories in order of my opinion of the usefulness of their content, though I didn’t say that explicitly.

Just my thoughts. I don’t claim to be able to compare to the amazing work you and others have done in the past but just wanted to give a newcomer’s perspective.

I’m currently not on any list to host any Carnival myself, simply because I’m not willing to spend an entire Sunday evening to put a good one together.