Via Random Pixels comes this New York Times article about bloggers that give up and abandon their blogs like a cheap pair of shoes...
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, 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.”
That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”
[...]
Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.
Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.
I began monitoring the South Florida blogosphere in earnest in February of 2008 with the birth of SFDB and, since then, have seen a number of blogs, including a few well-established ones, put to rest.
As the NYT article says, there are a number of reasons for a blog to end but from what I've observed in the last 16 months, most people just get tired of doing it and decide to hang it up. There are very few people that I know of who have taken up blogging to make money so I'm thinking the article's emphasis on that aspect is a bit overblown.
What do you think?
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5 comments:
I'm aware of the fact that I blog so very infrequently and about varying topics- and those sort of feed into each other.
I love blogging and writing, but more often than not, I simply see other people blog what I'm thinking, read it, agree, and go about my life. It'd be great if there was something I could rally around, but mostly I just have an idea or a story sometimes that's original and I post it. Otherwise, I can't think of something to write about so I don't.
It isn't because I don't want to, though.
"There are very few people that I know of who have taken up blogging to make money...."
Seriously? The ONLY reason I blog is to make money, lots of money, more than I know what to do with. I thought for certain the same was true of SFDB. I'm shocked. SHOCKED!
I've seen many bloggers become obsessed with the number of comments they get. That's a huge mistake. The first few months are often spent wondering if anyone is reading and if anyone cares. The fact is, it takes a long time to build a following. Not everyone is willing to devote that much time and energy, with so little in return.
I started blogging in the hope of reconnecting with old friends in the South Florida broadcasting world. Anything else is gravy! I've also decided that one post a week is enough. I've had friends who burned out quickly, trying to crank out post after post, long after they had anything much to say.
“There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
It probably can be traced back to the fact that many people who started blogs probably thought they had something to say.
And then suddenly realized that (a) they had nothing to say, or (b) no one cared what they had to say.
I consider myself fortunate that my blog receives a considerable amount of traffic. As long as that continues, I'll continue to blog.
I started my CareerJockey.org blog as an extension of my nonprofit work to help the unemployed. I love to write and it became my way of getting information to this audience that would otherwise just sit in my head or harddrive.
I stay driven because of my passion to help these folks and not to achieve any notoriety. (Definitely not for the $$). I can see why others just fall away when the novelty of it wears off.
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