It seems that every month there is a newspaper article about the death of blogging. Editors talk.
Verne Kopytoff wrote a sensationalist headline in the New York Times in February 2011 entitled, “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.” I and others responded at the time why Verne was nuts and blogging was very alive.
Another year and another headline, this time in my local newspaper, The Daily News of Newburyport, in the form of an editorial entitled, “Blogging Dies Its Slow Death.”
As if.
The editorial cites (but does not link to) this University of Massachusetts Dartmouth report, yet the latest in a series of annual reports that compare blogging trends in the Inc. 500 over time, that elaborates corporate blogs are disappearing and corporate Twitter accounts are gaining notoriety.
It’s Kopytoff all over again.
The fallacy of such reports by UMass Dartmouth is while the trend may be true for corporate blogs, it’s definitely not true for consumer blogs. Take a look at NM Incite’s report of 181 million blogs and you’ll quickly observe the trend of dying blogs is hardly true.
I grant the Daily News editor that the news is not all grim. He does write, “There’s no doubt that the blogosphere remains strong, at least for now. There’s an estimated 170 million blogs out there, many of them maintained by private individuals. But their growth has slowed over the past two years, and data indicates the growth has reached its peak.”
NM Incite doesn’t indicate any peak and the number of blogs continually added to Alltop is not waning either. So, what’s going on here? Why must headlines continue to be printed about the death of blogging?
When will part 272 be published?
About Ari Herzog
Ari, Thanks for this post… the Umass survey has provided some good data, year on year, but there may be issues with the indexes. I was thinking the Inc 500 index might have changed substancially in the last year, while the Fortune 500 stayed relatively static by comparison.
Verne Kopytoff (sp?), and Im putting this mildly, an idiot if he thinks blogging is dying.
Blogging is dying, which is exactly why WordPress alone hosts as many as 74 million websites, a number which is rapidly on the rise, right? Blogging is dying, which is why more than a 1000 new blogs are started on WordPress DAILY(!) and more than half a million posts are posted DAILY(!), right?
That Nielsen report pretty much backs this up as well.
I think blogging is just another name to which traditional media can announce and trumpet (late) and then bash it down a few years on. Blogging has existed in some way or another since the internet formed, it just now has a name, formats and specific tools to use. Blogging is here to stay whether the traditional journos like it or not.
I totally agree with you mark and the reason you see stupid claims like these and other wild claims is purely for media attention. If i made a post saying facebook lost $50 million in shares and brought up some random stats to attempt to prove it imagine how much attention my blog would get (at first).
Interesting post, Ari. I wonder if corporations are finding social media to have a better payoff? I’d love to see some data about corporate social media spending.
This would be interesting to find out. Blogging has become somewhat of a social media avenue though too. I’d be interested to see which is more effective but I bet that also depends on the business that you’re dealing with. Great question, any answers to this?
Reading stuff like that really annoys me Ari. It is just when a few ‘famous’ bloggers give up, suddenly the entire blogosphere is in decline. It isn’t. I have also seen so many ‘blogging is reborn’ articles, but is it really? No, it never died!
Blogging is growing in popularity all the time – as you suggest Ari – so how is it dying?
I think it’s just about the headlines, who isn’t interested in an article with this title from the blogger scene? Everyone will click on that post!
From my point of view blogging will not die in the foreseeable future. On the contrary, I think that many people will set up niche blogs and share their expertise with others. Maybe traditional media feels the cold breath of bloggers, seeing their turnover decreasing continuously, due to online projects.
Wishful thinking on the part of an industry, and profession, looking for a place in a changed world.
Wow, couldn’t have said it better.
That’s like a soda company claiming that people don’t get overweight anymore.
Completely agree with both of you. The problem is that the report focuses on Fortune 500 companies – meaning that it focuses on only 500 entities when there are millions of blogs! On top of that, its the 500 least flexible entities. This is hardly indicative of the overall trend.
Isn’t that the main strategy that mainstream (or not any more) media, like TV, have in order to fight competition? They sell the same stuff for ages. The demise of this and the end of that and so on. I am pretty sure that many “journalists” also bring to light opinions and rumours they heard or even worse thought by themselves.
Whenever a TV persona or mainstream newspaper “established” journalist says something, I tend to think twice. I prefer freelance journalists by the way…
PS. The graph is worth a thousand words!!
That also frustrates me. Blogging is not going to die any time soon. Stupid Verne.
Hi Ari,
Thankyou for the post. I don’t think so blogging is going to die and it remains alive also in my opinion it’s addiction increase day by day.
You presented it right! It’s an addiction. An addiction that makes me visit this blog to find new articles. I really like the writing style the author has.
Interesting, I definitely don’t think blogging is going to die and it does seem to be continuously increasing. Most likely the negativity comes from publishers who are upset with the print world dying!
Blogging is never going to die. As more individuals become more expressive, they will start to blog as well. Blogging has so much uses, say for posting food recipes, sharing life moments, and basically on whatever the individual enjoys, and the blogger gets to have more control on their posts rather than posting updates on Facebook or even Google+.
When I hear about reports like the one referred to in this post, it reminds me how out of touch many college campuses and professors are with the real world. Makes me almost embarrassed to have a college degree.
They look at some numbers and simply miss out on the big picture which is sad.
One reason that blogging will never die in the near future, at least, is because WordPress “blogs” are now CMS websites that have the blog loop with all the posts. So in other words, WordPress sites are highly functional sites “with blogs” so every small business owner, home-based business owner, and hobbyist will always use WordPress and share their thoughts and knowledge through blogging until something even better comes along. It won’t just fade out like the report from ZOO MASS, Dartmouth is implying!
~ Jupiter Jim
This also makes me tensed sometimes, But blogging is not gonna die it is the future of web and technology as well. What do you say?
I recall the 2009 Technorati review of the blogging year that said that many blogs are sitting doing nothing, but that there are new active ones appearing all the time.
Netcraft stats for Feb this year show that of the 612 million sites (not just blogs), 400 million are inactive.
And Alexa shows the top 30 million sites that are active – and those figures are moving all the time.
So I guess there is room to say that their is a lot of inactivity and also a lot of activity.
My feeling is that blogging won’t die as long as writers want their own space that they control in which to write.
That might change when someone invents a space that is simultaneously ones own space and others’ space – by which time we may have hologram screens.
It would seem the blogosphere is still going strong to me.
Lots of people have starting to quit their blogging career because of recent Google penguin update. Already Panda was hurting many blog and now this Penguin update almost kills many blogs.
The trick is to adapt. Google doesnt hold a vendetta against any of us, or our blogs, does it now? The updates are released for a reason, and it is important to remember that.
If you think people will stop blogging because of Pandas and Penguins, think again. As a blogger, one should be able to change and adapt. And if one’s blog is adversely affected by Google’s changes, maybe he or she should stop and think long and hard about what exactly it is that’s causing these adverse effects – using blackhat SEO strategies maybe? If the answer to that is yes, well, you’ve really got no one to blame but yourself.
I agreed with you Mohsin. Many blogs are now killed by these news and it also frustrates me but the thing is what we could do for this?
Blogging is definitely not dead. It’s still alive and well when done correctly.
Seems that as time passes we are seek to be given shorter and shorter bits of information. With all the kids growing up with Twitter I do wonder if traditional blogs will wane. When you are use to 140 character snippets trying to digest something like a 2000 word blog post will seem like a Tolstoy novel.
Would be a bummer if it did happen.
Part 272 should never be published, in my opinion.
I mean, I never really felt that blogging industry took a decline for the past few months, or even years. This kind of news just jeopardize the motivation and willingness of new bloggers to try and pursue the blogging industry. They should really stop publishing news like this.
It seems blogosphere is going dead because of frustration and negative impact to their business blog. But i think it is a part of business success.
Great blog – I am now one of your official readers and find myself making return visits to read up on your views as you can see on your comment that I’ve made the past few day’s.
Great post, Thanks for sharing.
I dont know. To be honest people will never stop consuming information. So saying blogging is dying is very untrue. These days it’s harder to stand out because of the vast amount of blogs online. So many just give up too easily. But those who stick with it are the ones that succeed.
Hello,
i am very surprised reading those stats, indeed i had the impression that before Facebook all of my friends (when i was around 18) had their own blog, but now their younger brothers or sisters are only writing and sharing stuff on their facebook profiles.
I am surprised that the blogs number is still rising so fast…
You nailed it there.
Blogging is just another form of writing, Ari.
I just don’t see any reason for people not to write.
Some blogs becoming inactive, yes. But they will be replaced by newer ones.
To me, blogging will never die. Except Internet die first
Totally agree with you post and your opinion Ari….
What the point of advertising and printing news about blogging’s death when by just reaching GOOGLE search it would easily show that Blogging is still up and running, maybe decreases but not dead/dying…….
Maybe their on to something, sabotaging ? ?
Thank you for sharing this post bro….
Keep it up.
Blogging is actually a business for some people.When they quit, it seems temporarily that blogging is reduced .However,some new blog sites appear in the same time period.This is correct,when people see inactive blog sites,they take the impression of reduced blogging.However,it is not so.
Why would blogging die? Is it because the bloggers stop? No, some of them are making a good living from it. The other bloggers see that it is possible for them to make a good living from it.
Is it because there are no readers? I don’t think so…there are tons of people reading blogs.
I agree, blogs are not on the endangered list.
Hey Great review! I had Fun reading your post and I can say that I must agree with what you have written. Keep it up!
I think it comes from a misunderstanding of the evolution of what blogging is, and what blogging can be. Is blogging dying? I’m not so sure, perhaps it would be more accurate to say the old blogging paradigm is dying. There has been such an advancement in the influence and potential from blogging websites, I find it hard to believe that such an online voice will die off. Instead, I think it will evolve and improve, as it has.
What, blogging about to die?
Really don´t think so.There are over 200 Million of them on the web with more coming every single day.A-list bloggers have a lot of influence and when they say something like that many take it as the absolute truth.
Blogging is going nowhere, but it will change like everything else online.We had Web1.0, now Web2.0 and soon Web3.0…
Looks like a Google stock chart. Yep, Google is going bankrupt, at least that’s what the news editor would think.
Blogging is doing just fine, not matter how much newspapers would like it to die.
I just wanted to say thanks for the laugh. It is funny how media is so one sided they seem to forget almost the entire picture of anything, if they even portray even a portion of it that is. I am pretty new to blogging and I know it is not dying. In fact, I think it is becoming even more popular. It seems as if there are more people blogging and more blogs about more topics and it is only increasing exponentially. Thanks for the great read, Ricky Strode
Crazy headlines get people reading. Scoffing, but reading. Wouldn’t suprise me if the guys who wrote those editorials were just trying to see if any bloggers were looking. Ha. Sure, those corporate blogs are dead. Because they’re boring. We’d all rather read a quick tweet than a long blog post about corporate who-knows-what. As for the rest of the world, we read our obituary, we laughed, then we returned to the draft of our latest blog posts.
It’s quite comedic now that many blogs have been posting about the death of blogging. I don’t see any proof on that so far.
I think blogging is here to stay. The way Google are increasingly valuing real content on the web (Panda etc), the push towards authorship markup and the problems they have controlling spam based on backlinks (which I suspect will be partially eased by AuthorRank) I see blogging as here to stay and growing in importance over time.
Blogging is dead…long live blogging.
What a farce. It’s funny how “the media” reports these things as if to validate that their media is not dying in comparison.
When is the last time you picked up a newspaper? Contrast with HuffPo, which is nothing more than a big-ass blog with multiple contributors curating content they get from…other blogs
it’s ironic indeed, only real bloggers know what blogging is..
As the old axiomatic oxymorong goes: “Never tell someone they’re doing something wrong” (like I just did).
Could it be that the dying blogs are the ones that are doing it wrong?
Out on alimb: The UMD report covers mainly corporate blogs, which nobody reads anyway since the preponderance of corporate blogs seem to be mainly PR re-treads and not actual bi-directional dialogue. RIP.
Anecdotally: my own blog is the main vehicle by which I gain customer insight, share information, and receive actual business leads.
Go figure.
This means quality is even more important. People putting together bulleted lists of the same info will not stand out. Its time to break the mold and really be creative like that blog the oatmeal.
There will always be high demand for high quality infotainment.
The way to really make it is to promote your own uniqueness. This is not something that others can copy. (Or at least they can’t copy it fast enough.)
Ideas are the future stop self censoring.
If we believe everything we read in the newspapers then perhaps it’s the beginning of the end as everything seems to be dying. Apparently, SEO is dead, blogging is dead, social media is dead. What else isn’t dead? It’s just noise, and probably someone trying to make a name for themselves by publishing a controversial article.