A few weeks ago a really interesting article by Douglas Quenqua in the NY Times entitled Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest talked about the status of the blogosphere and bloggers today.
The article cited data from Technorati that shows that 95% of all blogs have effectively been abandoned (weren’t updated for more than 120 days).
Why?
Some bloggers never really took off, others got too busy, others felt too exposed and shuttered their blogs in order to regain a shred of privacy, others felt web 2.0 changed the nature of blogging favoring shorter posts versus longer more journal-like styles.
Some had thought their blogs would bring them fame or fortune or both, and left their blogs when those dreams went unrealized. (For more on the money myths of blogging read this article that reports that the average ad blog makes only $5k per year.)
So, with no shortage of blogs and bloggers out there, it seems we are at the next stage of the blogosphere life cycle. Blogging has been around long enough to have grown in awareness then popularity, to have myths built up and exposed, and to shift in the fundamental usage. We are at an evolutionary moment.
Perhaps these people are using less social media overall, or perhaps they are just are abandoning blogs and moving to the more-portable and more immediate facebook or twitter applications.
Perhaps casual users will all move to these other mediums leaving the blogosphere more dedicated writers, story tellers, or information sellers. Perhaps blogs will continue to fill the journalistic space where the print media field dissolved.
Perhaps blogs will just be the new “home base” where all these communication mediums are docked and stored.
Quenqua also quotes Richard Jalichandra of Technorati who said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
This reminded us of a similar report on Twitter. Now obviously Twitter is a newer technology that is by all accounts just taking off, and certainly most people are just getting comfortable with it.
Nevertheless... A study conducted at Harvard Business School looked at 300,000 random twitter users found that:
* Among these users the median number of lifetime tweets is one!
* & the top 10% of twitter users account for 90% of all the tweets
(& interestingly though men and women follow a similar number of people, men tend to have 15% more followers than women)
However, for those that are still eager to start or build a blog (for a larger audience than one) here are some good resources that can help you learn from the ground up - (not that we are speaking as experts here, we know we still have a long way to go!)
ProBlogger: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
(used to be a free email-a-day program and now is a (not-free) e-book. 14,000 bloggers have done the program, which really breaks the gargantuan task down into bites sized chunks.)
Quick Sprout's Search Engine Optimization for your Blog
The article cited data from Technorati that shows that 95% of all blogs have effectively been abandoned (weren’t updated for more than 120 days).
Why?
Some bloggers never really took off, others got too busy, others felt too exposed and shuttered their blogs in order to regain a shred of privacy, others felt web 2.0 changed the nature of blogging favoring shorter posts versus longer more journal-like styles.
Some had thought their blogs would bring them fame or fortune or both, and left their blogs when those dreams went unrealized. (For more on the money myths of blogging read this article that reports that the average ad blog makes only $5k per year.)
So, with no shortage of blogs and bloggers out there, it seems we are at the next stage of the blogosphere life cycle. Blogging has been around long enough to have grown in awareness then popularity, to have myths built up and exposed, and to shift in the fundamental usage. We are at an evolutionary moment.
Perhaps these people are using less social media overall, or perhaps they are just are abandoning blogs and moving to the more-portable and more immediate facebook or twitter applications.
Perhaps casual users will all move to these other mediums leaving the blogosphere more dedicated writers, story tellers, or information sellers. Perhaps blogs will continue to fill the journalistic space where the print media field dissolved.
Perhaps blogs will just be the new “home base” where all these communication mediums are docked and stored.
Quenqua also quotes Richard Jalichandra of Technorati who said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
This reminded us of a similar report on Twitter. Now obviously Twitter is a newer technology that is by all accounts just taking off, and certainly most people are just getting comfortable with it.
Nevertheless... A study conducted at Harvard Business School looked at 300,000 random twitter users found that:
* Among these users the median number of lifetime tweets is one!
* & the top 10% of twitter users account for 90% of all the tweets
(& interestingly though men and women follow a similar number of people, men tend to have 15% more followers than women)
However, for those that are still eager to start or build a blog (for a larger audience than one) here are some good resources that can help you learn from the ground up - (not that we are speaking as experts here, we know we still have a long way to go!)
ProBlogger: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
(used to be a free email-a-day program and now is a (not-free) e-book. 14,000 bloggers have done the program, which really breaks the gargantuan task down into bites sized chunks.)
Quick Sprout's Search Engine Optimization for your Blog
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment