Blogging is dead. Here is why.
In preface, when I say blogging is dead, I am referring to blogging in the niches I am most familiar with and active in ; other niches may be different, and I have no way of ascertaining of viability of blogging in subjects as varied as, say, sports cars or fashion, but I imagine the frustration for bloggers in those niches isn’t dissimilar from my own. Second, this assessment only applies to new blogs. Established blogs with good search engine ranking, lots of readers, and high authority will remain dominant, immune to this decline.
So why did blogging die? It comes down to three major reasons:
- Popular bloggers stopped linking-out to new bloggers
- Competition from established media companies, including sites that allow guest writers
- People stopped trusting blogs
Links are the currency of blogging — if you don’t get links by reputable bloggers endorsing your blog, you will never get the traffic nor the ‘link juice’ to have a successful blog. As blogging became more competitive, especially since 2008, the bloggers who rose to the top saw it advantageous to ‘protect’ their traffic and their little blog empires from competition and rather than raise others up, they pulled-up the ladder, constantly linking to already successful bloggers but not taking risk to link out to new bloggers, so I imagine many of these new bloggers quit, unable to get enough traffic to have a decent readership.
But, economically speaking, not linking out to new bloggers is a rational thing to do. New bloggers cannot possibly offer commensurate return traffic, so established bloggers, in a I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine reciprocity, know they can get reciprocal traffic by linking to other established bloggers, the result being a symbiosis or feedback loop between this clique. Unless you have among the best content in the world and the tenacity to demand to be heard, it’s virtually impossible to enter the loop. You will be ignored. The other bloggers don’t need you, since you have nothing of equal economic value to offer in return. Again, economically speaking, this is understandable, and maybe if you can come to terms with this reality you can at least achieve some inner peace and understanding that it’s not your fault that you failed at blogging despite your best effort to write good content.
Second, many bloggers sold out, subsumed by popular news sites and user-generated aggregators like Vox, Forbes, Fortune, Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, and Bloomberg View, all high-traffic sites that offer some pay (based on some metric like page views or clicks) and exposure in exchange for copyrights and editorial control. But it’s not only that these sites poached popular bloggers, ‘old school’ sites, which were once behind the curve in this ‘new medium’ called blogging, not only rapidly caught up, but exceeded most bloggers. In the 90's and the early 2000's, the major news and opinion sites — Forbes, Fortune, National Review and CNN, for example — were merely digital silos for offline content. Then around 2002–2004, with the introduction of the Wordpress and Blogger platform, blogging took to life, and the now these ‘silos’ were beginning to look antiquated. But then something happened — a big bang that echoes today — Old Media fought back and began major overhauls, incorporating user-generated content, a more ‘conversational’ tone to their articles, the ubiquitous glossy ‘large font’ web 2.0 themes that you see everywhere, comments sections, and social media features — just like blogs, but with multi-million dollar budgets behind them.
From a precient 2011 article, <a href=”http://rightwingnews.com/blogosphere/the-slow-painful-coming-death-of-the-independent-conservative-blogosphere/">The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere</a>
<blockquote>The market has become more mature. It’s like laundry detergent: If you come up with a better detergent that’s superior to anything on the market tomorrow, good luck trying to get anyone to buy it when you’re facing Tide, Cheer, All, Wisk, and all these other established brand names that spend more money than you’ll make in a hundred lifetimes on marketing and can sell their product cheaper than you because they pump out a Grand Canyon worth of the stuff every day. Sure, it’s not exactly the same situation in the conservative blogging world, but good luck convincing tens of thousands of people that if they have time to read only one more blog today, it should be your brand new blog instead of Michelle Malkin or Instapundit.</blockquote>
The world is becoming like cable TV: expensive, with high barriers to entry.
It’s hard for independent bloggers to compete with professional sites such as the New York Times, Wall St. Journal or The Atlantic, with their A-list roster of writers and professionally written & edited fact-checked content with interactive inforgraphics, to boot. These sites, which have many writers producing dozens — if not hundreds of pages of content a day — make visiting individual, smaller blogs an uneconomical use of time. Bloombergview.com, a subsidiary of bloomberg.com, alone publishes <i>dozens</i> of opinion articles a day, many of these articles written by bloggers who joined Bloomberg as paid writers. Why visit a dozen small blogs, some which have butchered syntax and grainy pictures, when you can visit just five or so professional news/aggregator sites that have huge glossy pictures and pages upon pages of fresh content that is not only engaging and well-written, but (presumably) accurate?
This <a href=”http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP4646">assesment</a> of the state of blogging seems spot-on:
<blockquote>The world of blogging as we once knew it is dead and gone. Independent websites run by single, mostly amateur individuals have given way to large internet media houses featuring re-blogged and syndicated content.
Where have the individual personalities gone? What happened to unfiltered content presented by non-professionals? This characteristic form of online information has largely transformed into short posts (tweets, comments, questions, answers, forum posts, wiki updates, etc) shared on large, external websites and social media platforms, which are now the most powerful (and in many cases, only viable) platforms for user-generated content. </blockquote>
Social media is taking over the role of bloggers and is a major contributing factor for the decline of independent blogging.
But also it seems like the ‘rough on the edges’ aspect of blogging is losing its appeal as readers have stopped trusting blogs, choosing to ignore them in favor of polished professional content. On sites that allow users to submit content, stories from professional sites such as the New York Times get considerably more ‘up-votes’ than independent blogger content. It’s not even close…an Atlantic article about the prison epidemic (or some other human rights issue) will get dozens of up-votes in a couple hours while a blog post will get maybe five or none at all. Maybe the Atlantic article is better, but no one wants the blog one, that’s for sure. It’s damaged goods, toxic. So I’m not sure why this is…maybe bloggers have gotten a bad reputation for spam, inaccuracies, shooting from the hip instead of being more nuanced like the NYT, and excessive self-promotion. But it’s not a fair fight though. As mentioned earlier, established sites have teams to proofread and fact-check things, as well as professional journalists who have a knack for writing about stuff that people want to read. And the one edge that bloggers did have, the ability to be uninhibited without the consequences traditional journalists face, is now possibly working against them as that type of writing style, which worked well up until around 2013, is becoming obsolete. In 2008 it was much better for bloggers. People read blogs and linked to them constantly, but now everyone reads and links to NYT, Forbes, Bloomberg, Atlantic, or Wall St. Journal, as we’re seeing the uninterrupted rise of the expert — from the math expert, to the finance expert, to the expert wonk, to the expert scientist, economist, or sociologist — so if you’re not an expert, you will face a major uphill battle gaining any sort of credibility or readership.
The final reason has to do with social news/forum websites clamping down on blogs and self-promotion, which they perceive to be spam. Pre-2004, when everyone posted on online forums, you could put your URL at the bottom of all your posts (for those who use forums, this is called a signature), but major sites like Reddit don’t allow it. Major headlines over spam, especially since 2004, has made everyone so risk-averse, people losing sleep over the possibility that the innocent link to a personal homepage could be a front for a Russian spam syndicate. And heaven forbid, an individual try to make a profit from his work, let alone get a few clicks, and all alarms go off. This is why the entitlement/welfare spending problem will keep growing — everything is too darn hard and expensive for mere mortals without the necessary connections or luck.
Some possible alternatives to blogging:
Try publishing a book on Amazon. Maybe that medium works better for getting ideas across.
Write for an established, high-traffic publication, but then you’re more of a journalist than a blogger. You’ll have forfeit editorial control and copyrights, plus the pay may not be good, assuming you even get paid. The branding power may be worthwhile in the long-run.
Twitter: Very slow-going unless you are well-known off-line. Your tweets and re-tweets will be ignored.
Sober Realist writes for http://greyenlightenment.com
