The Big Blog
Bust
Since
Christianity Today announced the Death
of the Blog in their October 2007 issue I’ve
been thinking about blogging. Of the 300
million people who took up blogging a full 200 million have given it up and let
their pages go inactive. (Whether they can still be called “bloggers”
depends on your view of Eternal Security;-) There are
today only about 100 million active blogs. Actually I guess I don’t “blog”
technically, since I started posting a “Tuesday Column” for ministers in 1995,
long before the notion of blogging existed.
But I use a blog for comments
so I guess I’m still listed among the remaining 100 million active bloggers. I’ve been wondering why so many blogs
go belly up… and I’ve also been thinking about the future of blogging. Here’s what I think.
Six reasons why many blogs go belly up.
1.
It’s hard work.
As someone
doing it weekly for 13 years I can testify that it consumes
3-4 hours a week—hours I could be using for other things.
2.
Bloggers get little appreciation.
Getting
gratitude for blogging is rare. If we bloggers quit blogging and used the saved time to visit
folk at the hospital, mentor young folk, or cut our neighbor’s grass we’d get
far more appreciation.
3.
Blogging makes no money.
Except
for some rare exceptions there’s not much money in blogging:
If we spent the three hours a week we write blogs in
working at Taco bell we’d at least have $25 to show for it. A solid professional writer I could use 3
hours to write an assignment that would bring a few hundred bucks in the same
amount of time. No wonder many professional writers have quit blogging.
4.
People can be mean.
When
we put our ideas in the public domain, it opens us up for public abuse and some
folk feel free to torch our ideas (and us personally) publicly. This
discourages some—especially women, from continued blogging.
5.
Running out of ideas.
Writing
a dozen blogs is not difficult, but after writing 100
blogs ideas are harder to
come by.
6.
Little feedback. Blogging is like preaching a sermon to which
nobody responds with a single word. On the DruryWriting.com site
we get about a thousand visitors every day—but often a whole day goes by
without a single comment. It can make
you think you are talking into the wind and (especially?) ministers used to
reinforcement can get discouraged. I meet people face to face every week who
say they read my column “but I’ve never responded.”
These
and many other reasons you can probably think of may have caused many to
abandon their blogging discipline. So what about the future? I have several predictions.
Eight predictions on the future of blogging
1.
The growth of blogging will end.
The
number of blogs in the future will stabilize at around
100 million, or even less. A shake-out is coming and many
more Bloggers will abandon blogging. The number going inactive will start matching
(or beating) the number of new blogs. Many folk will
move on to other things. The blogging fad is ending.
2.
Video blogging will rise dramatically.
Anyone
with a fast Internet connection will soon figire out they
can watch the Internet on their TV (once they discover a simple S-Video cord turns
their laptop into a CATV source and they can watch their
favorite programs directly onto their TV screens whenever they want to). Americans
will seldom read when they can watch.
3.
More people will read fewer blogs….
In
the coming shake-out some blogs will gain thousands
of readers at the expense of other blogs. Fewer blogs will
have greater audiences.
4.
Blogs will get longer and shorter.
Blogs that capture a following
will either be (a)short single-screen entries that can
be read in 2 minutes, or (b exhaustive well-researched articles dealing with a
single subject in detail.
5.
More blogs will become daily.
The blogs with the biggest following publish daily. People will quit reading 20 blogs and start following three or four as they become more
selective. My associate Ken Schenck has already moved this
way.
6.
Community sites will displace many traditional blogs.
Many
of my students already have exchanged bloging for facebook
and its up-to-the minute contact of a single community. The Facebook community approach is already being copied by mychurch.org and Twitter and dozens of other sites.
7.
Blogs will increasingly specialize
Pressed
for time, future readers will select a few blogs in
their area of interest area for their reading. Both my son have already moved
that way, John specializes in
theology and David in leadership.
8.
There will be more team blogs.
Technically
a blog is the commentary of one person. But who says it has to be that way? Of the top 100 blogs online only 12 are by individuals, the other 88
are team blogs written by a whole group of writers. Many
of the best weekly blogs by individuals will merge and
become SuperBlogs by like minded (or perhaps unlike
minded?) people providing an alternative community type blogging.
As for me and the Tuesday Column
As
for me and this site…
I’m still thinking about all this. I write this column for ministers every Tuesday
because…. Well, because I’m a writer. I practice writing here. Would I write if 90%
of my readers quit coming? Sure! What if only ten people a
day read my column? Yep, I’d still write. Why? Because half of
those who visit this site do so through a search engine. They Googled something like Pastoral
Prayers or they typed in "what
to do when you've married a jerk" or even “+democrat
+Christian.” [whoops!]. They have no idea who I am—I just came up on
their Google search. That’s what I like about “writing
for inventory”—by writing every week I put stuff in inventory that people will find
years later when they’re interested in that particular thing. They sought and
they found. For instance in the current month (October 2007) 13,676 people have
read the four Tuesday columns posted. However, during that same period another
11,896 visitors found something else on this site through search engines. So even
if nobody at all read my weekly columns I’d still write for the people who will
find it in the future when their seeking. So I guess I’ll keep at it even as it declines in
popularity. It’s
worth the 3-4 hours I give to it.
Then
again, maybe I ought to use my time to visit people in the hospital.
So what do you think?
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