The Next Web

Blogs aren’t dead. They are maturing!

By Boris
April 24, 2009
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Andrew Keen says that blogs are dead.
Matt Mullenweg says that blogging is only getting bigger.
Of course, they are both wrong.

Blogs arent dead. They are maturing!

The ways to promote yourself online are increasing every year. Once upon a time all we had was homepages with hard to remember urls at free hosting services which plastered our pages with bright and animated ads. We used the Blink tag, lots of animated gifs and some text. The most used sentence, no doubt, was “Under Construction”.

After that we evolved and started blogging. No more blinking eyecandy but nicely designed Themes with lots of useful widgets in the sidebar. And Google ads so we could earn some money. We wrote 2 posts a day in the first week, 1 posts a day in the second week then 1 post in the next month and then we simply stopped.

Now we have Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace pofiles, a personal and business blog, Delicious and StumbleUpOn tagged links collections and a Twitter and Flickr account.

I remember when I blogged a lot  on my personal blog I used to start with a simple idea (one that would probably fit in 140 characters) and sit down to write a blog post about it. I wrote an introduction, 3 examples and a conclusion. Then I added an illustration, some tags and a few hyperlinks and published. That generally took an hour.

Now I just tweet the simple idea I started out with and I’m done.

So, are blogs dead? No, of course not. Blogs are maturing and starting to follow basic economic principles where wealth (visitors, readers, audience) is unequally distributed. In the year 2000 the richest 1% of adults alone own 40% of global assets. That is how wealth is distributed in our world. When blogging started to hype the general idea was that everybody could make money from his or her blog and have an audience. Wealth (our readers) would be equally distributed.

In reality it turns out that most blogs have no more than 10 followers a month. In terms of audience these are the worlds poor. The bottom 50% of the world owns barely 1% of global wealth. Blogs are no exception to this unfortunate fact. We were hoping that the Lorenz Curve (the 80/20 rule) wouldn’t apply to blogging.

We now know it does.

On Twitter or Facebook these numbers work differently. If you have a Twitter accunt with 100 followers you might be perfectly happy with that. There is no need to make money on Twitter or get a huge following. A few interested listeners can make the whole experience worthwhile.

All of this leads to a huge shift from blogging to Twitter. Or to Microblogging in general. Matt Mullenweg told the audience at The Next Web Conference that in his experience blogging was actually growing. What he probably meant is that the top bloggers are receiving more visitors because Twitter and Facebook make sharing links easier.

I have no doubt however that a lot of people who would  have started a blog 2 years ago are now building their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook or simply sticking to Twitter.

Anyone who says that blogging is dead has little or no sense of history. New technologies never ‘kill’ their predecessors. Television didn’t kill Radio and the Internet didn’t kill the Television. They all get a share of our attention and find their own audiences.

Blogs are dead?

No, The rumors of bloggings death have been greatly exaggerated…


  • I agree. Most tweets I receive are with links to blogs. So, they actually can not exist without each other.
  • You nailed it! Blogs are becoming more mature and more professional. I just hope that one thing doesn't change: in the current ecosystem it's still fairly easy for talent to get noticed. Let's not lose that beautiful aspect.
  • This dead or alive discussion is pretty boring, but...

    They aren't dead.

    I tend to think they are slowly but surely maturing into a tool that will be part of a generic web toolkit.

    Seen from the functional perspective, they are quite easy to use to get a message on the web. Like a hammer is surely an easy tool to drive a nail into wood. Pneumatic nailguns might even be easier, yet carpenters do no carry them around all day long. As for hammers, they do. On top of that, you needn't be a master carpenter to use a hammer, apprentices can use them. Even the clumsiest use them. For heavens sake they never started using nailguns! Blogs are like hammers, useful for a wide community.

    So, just to nail it once more, blogs ain't dead, like hammers ain't dead.
  • Blogs are actually a great way to get all you information stream you develop online back in one central place that you can present to others.

    So I think blogging will actually grow through microblogging, where ideas are generated and then brought back to your blog to write full articles about these idea's.

    With the backtype comment plugin you are also able to get back all the comment stream on twitter ect. about your post in one central place: you comment section.

    So I think for you personal brand in the end all your activities should point back to your blog, where you can get more value out of it.

    Maybe all these other activities that bloggers are participating in these days indeed results in less time spent on the blog, but it's no dead.
  • Sidharth
    Nice oneliner to end . Brought a smile to my fave. Good article apple fanboy
  • Hahahha I love this the full circle of the blog so to speak. I remember when I had personal web page and website if it had more than one page


    It was a big deal years ago and in another life, to upload to your isp host and have a personal webpage; linking to all the places you frequented: like ebay and the ebay about me page. Or ivillage, etc.

    Later it seemed that blogging became the big thing and I really am dense and don't see much difference other than frequency of expected postings. Microblogging seems to be the newer niche, with links to webpages where you get on a soapbox or have larger blog or whatever.

    Me? I'm with the microblog mostly (twitwall) and a few blogs that I dont' do a lot with.

    Now I may have to expand back to a website with a personal webpage. :)
  • Completely agree with this. Blogging is constantly evolving, just like all other forms of communication. There will always be a space for blogs, just like there will always (probably) be a space for newspapers. The size of that space is yet to be determined.
  • Yes, and the size and shape of that space might be changing too. Just like there will likely be less newspapers and a few big ones getting more traffic?
  • Only about a third of our traffic is to the "top blogs" and that has stayed pretty constant over the years. Most blogs get a moderate amount of traffic, and seem happy with that. The folks who go for a ton of traffic, subscribers, and followers are in the minority.
  • What I'm basically predicting is that in the following years more traffic will start flowing to that top 33%. And maybe that has been happening over the past year too. Is there a way to check that?
  • I definitely agree. For someone to say that blogs are dead is absurd! They are definitely growing more and more each day. We find new ways to increase SEO and that's what will help improve viewership with blogs. Granted not every blog is viewed as much as some popular one's, but that's where maturing comes into play!
  • One who says blogs are dead is certainly out of his mind. They are growing, growing phenomenally. Blogging is no more an ordinary place for blogger-reader interactions and ads. It is a business which is a gateway to enter/explore various channels in the internet. Your blog is almost your startup now.
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