Bloglovin’s role in the infrastructure of social media
In a recent Medium article, blogger and columnist Anil Dash took readers through a summary of the history of trends for the blogosphere, and of tools that have been and are currently available. In the article, he highlighted how the transition to a new world of manifold social media channels has created gaps and opportunities in the market. We couldn’t agree more with his evaluation. In fact, at Bloglovin’, we see it as central to our mission to provide solutions to some key areas mentioned in the article: aggregation, discovery and search.
Aggregation:
RSS has, for a long time, been a great way for readers to get timely updates from their favorite blogs and websites. With the shutdown of Google Reader and with the emergence of a galaxy of social media channels, feeds have largely taken over this function, from Facebook to Twitter. At Bloglovin’, we have evolved the notion of a traditional blog reader, integrating the benefits of aggregation with social discovery, providing a platform where readers can not only follow their favorite blogs, read every post in one place and be notified of new posts, but where they can discover new content based on their friends’ activity, their history on other social channels, the activity of their favorite influencers and much more. With 8M registered users and 850K bloggers that have created an account on the platform, we believe that a visual aggregation service fills a need and a gap in the market by bringing new content to readers in a structured and visually appealing way, while providing bloggers with a way to reach the largest possible audience of like-minded fans.
Discovery & Tagging:
Trending tags, first popularized by Twitter, have been widely adopted. They are a feature of networks such as Facebook and Pinterest. At Bloglovin’, we agree with Anil’s insight with respect to how social media sites are often surfacing these topics based on short-term and sometimes not particularly poignant trends, and how the same kind of structure isn’t available for medium and long-form content.
As Anil writes in his article: “The odd result of this is that we have trending topics in networks like Twitter and Facebook, where the vast majority of updates are short and trivial, but we don’t have easily-explorable tags, hashtags or trending topics for articles and stories that are longer and more substantive. It’s not hard to picture how different a trending topics list could look like if connected to major media sites and blogs, instead of just social network updates.”
On the Bloglovin’ platform, over 5 million blogs are tracked for new updates every day. Their content is automatically tagged for recommendations, discovery and trend analysis. We recently shared our thoughts on why surfacing trends in terms of medium and long-form content is a massive opportunity here. We couldn’t agree more in terms of medium and long-form content being a more reliable indicator of what’s interesting and meaningful on the Internet.
Search:
Anil was also spot on about the fact that a big void was left once Google killed its “Blog Search” service. There is no easy way for readers to search content published by up-and-coming blogs on Google or other search services.
As Anil wrote: “It’s easy to imagine that modern search software and vastly cheaper hardware make it possible to recreate a search engine for frequently-updated sites like news sites and blogs, with domain-specific features that general tools like Google News don’t offer.”
At Bloglovin’, we strive to fill this gap. We make available to users advanced search capabilities that let readers find blogs by topic, tags, blog name, or by the name of the bloggers. This helps bloggers garner more followers and traffic, while helping readers find the best content with respect to a specific topic of their choice. As we work to evolve and improve our search capabilities, we’ll announce additional search features in the coming months.
