Blog Hops - A Few Initial Conclusions

I've just completed a couple of blog hops:

The May Monster Madness 2013

Blogging From A to Z April Challenge 2013

And on Fantasy Boys XXX, we run our own weekly blog hop every Tuesday, the Drabble Cascades.

I'm new to blog hops, but I thought I'd share a few conclusions I've come to about them so far.

1. Firstly, they're fun, but boy are they a lot of work - it's not just the writing of blog entries, it the interaction with the other blog hoppers. This takes time, but is very rewarding.
2. The two blog hops I joined in were at either end of the spectrum when it came to numbers, May Madness has just under 50 blogs involved and A to Z was in the thousands. I have concluded that I prefer the smaller hops. That is not to say A to Z wasn't fun, but with thousands of blogs, I didn't get a chance to go back to many after one visit and there was no practical way I could follow all those blogs, so it felt a bit like window shopping. I did follow a handful of blogs that really impressed me, but I didn't make many lasting contacts. However, on the May Monster Madness, I did manage to get round most of the blogs, I followed most of them and I found some bloggers whose content I really gelled with. :)
3. A theme to a blog hop means I found more blogs that I liked first time around. A to Z had many, many types of blog involved, as you'd expect with thousands of entries, and some just didn't interest me when I clicked on them. However, with May Monster Madness, we're all talking about vampires, werewolves, zombies and the like and so most of the posts were just up my street.
4. With a small hop, more people interacted with my blog as well.  Putting my cynical hat on, when you're one thousand and something on a linked list, it's not surprising not many people get that far and visit your blog. With 50 hoppers, there are still enough folks who might find your blog interesting, but not too many that you get lost in the crowd. 

I'd join in both hops again and I'm joining in other hops too, but next time I do the A to Z, I will have to pick the blogs I visit more carefully, decide what I like and stick with those blogs, because I got overwhelmed with the sheer number of blogs in the hop this time around and didn't keep track of the ones I actually wanted to go back to.