Is Blogging Dead?
Is Blogging Dead?
Well obviously not if you are reading these words. But the world has changed. Back in 2005 when I started, blogging was a fresh platform to exchange ideas and push content onto an unsuspecting world. As the popularity of the format has increased over the years, so has the extraneous noise created by millions of bloggers. What separates the most popular writers today is not necessarily the best content. More likely the most viewed pages are the ones who avoid the filters effectively. SEO, social share ability, and a whole new set of criteria define what’s worth viewing. But is blogging dead in the water?
Content creators have moved on to new and more exciting ways to reach audiences. Technology has advanced at a rapid pace. Blogging has become the new snail mail. Yet snail mail still exists and is one of the many ways of sending information and advertising even today.
Can the same be said of weblogging?
The Visual Frontier
Blogging is so, you know, two-dimensional. Creators of today prefer kinetic content, not just words that sit idly on the page. The You Tube generation wants to see and not just hear or read. Thus we have a whole new group of content creators who have never written a single thing. Even more so, they catch eyes by creating scenes and documenting experiences more than just spinning an argument or telling a story.
Facebook live has also captured this same group of producers and audiences. Unlike the original scripted video material that was cutting edge just a few years ago, now experiences can be documented and blasted out to the world in real-time as they occur.
Is blogging dead? it certainly seems less exciting than some of the other avenues in which people are consuming content.
Audiophiles
One of the problems with the written word is that you have to stand still and concentrate to digest it. In this fast paced world, many are looking for audio instead of visual stimulation. What else are you going to do when you are taking a jog or on that horrible morning commute in your car?
Podcasts have fulfilled this space nicely. Often as carefully produced and chocked full of content as a well written blog post, these episodes require less concentration and add in other flavor such as music and multiple viewpoints at once.
Is blogging dead?
You might not want to ask a podcaster.
Social Media
Blogging is long form media in an ever-increasing short form world. We are becoming used to multiple small snippets of content spewed out into the ether at varying times of the day. How else do you explain Facebook status updates? Tweets? Snapchat and Instagram?
Can long form survive in this much celebrated short form milieu. Is it finally and totally over? Is blogging dead?
Maybe. Or maybe not. After all, many status updates, tweets, and even pins eventually link to some form of written content or another. It may be that social media is more of an amplifier than a form of communication unto itself.
The jury is still out.
Final Thoughts/We Are Still Here
There are more blogs out there today than ever. Yet it is hard not to feel that the world is passing us by. The ways in which we communicate have expanded to more visual and audible options. Social media forces us to communicate in small snippets and acronyms.
All that being said, the written word is still vibrant and expanding on the internet. Although we have more competitors, the blogosphere continues to grown and spread.
Just check out Rockstar Finance and see how many new personal finance blogs are added to the database everyday.
No.
Blogging is not dead.
Blogging may not be dead, but physician personal finance blogging has become an extremely crowded field. I seek blogs that provide different ways of looking at physician mindset and psychology (like yours and crispydoc) or blogs that are targeted to mid-late career physicians (hatton1). The “live like a resident lesson” is great when you are starting your career, but 20+ years in, the message is not applicable. There are not enough ways that you can explain the 4% rule, discuss the backdoor Roth, and the value of saving and investing that can make it more useful once the lesson is learned.
I have, for a long time, preferred the audio content, podcasts and such. I can listen while walking dogs, exercising, folding laundry, etc.
Crowded for sure. it’s hard to separate oneself.
Blogging is definitely not dead. But I think readers do want to engage with the bloggers they read. Enter social media. The problem lies with the amount of choices. One or two platforms are probably best to focus on for any blogger. I tried doing too much with social media. And got burned out. I’d rather focus my time writing good content. Though social media does help for new readers to find bloggers (apart from existing readers to engage).
Social media can be exhausting.
I think blogging is not dead yet, but very close to it. In this fast-paced world, no one has the time to just peruse over blog contents. It’s so much easier to just listen to a podcast on the way to work, while walking the dog, listening while cooking, etc. If the goal is to monetize a blog, I don’t believe it is very likely anymore.
I agree that podcasts are taking over. Stay tuned for more on that.
I was going to leave an audio comment, but I’m struggling with my microphone. I think I’ll do an internet search and read a blog about how to get that set up 🙂
HA!
Well I just started my blog a couple weeks ago so I’m one of the many that keep popping up, so sorry to muddy the waters, but I think if you have good content and know how to appropriately get your message out there than you can still do well and there will still be an audience.
There are more new blogs than ever. So it couldn’t be dead, right?
Susan already has the best comment as usual so I’ll just say it better not be dead. If so I’m putting an awful lot of energy into a dead thing….
Me too!
Interesting. I think blogs at the start begin to fill a Gaussian space (bell curve). First there are only a few and the space is poorly filled but each point is easy to see. Soon the space becomes more crowded and better blogs start to get pushed out to the tail + tail worse blogs get pushed to the – tail or cease publication. Then blogs morph from a content base with the readers interest at heart, to an analytics base as bloggers become entrepreneurial and one analytic the goal is to drive traffic and eventually to sell a product. The reader goes from correspondent to analytical object and it becomes evident in the content and the tone. To stay in the + tail and maintain truly interesting and unique content I think is rare, and that blog is probably hard to find given the cacophony of the mass of average to sub par competition all seeking wealth and fame. The bell curve turns into the echo chamber. But a few through skill or luck or insight and savvy marketing and media maintain some level out in the tail. Average Bloggers tend to look for a 4 x25 formula to achieve success. Superior bloggers offer superior knowledge.
The other problem is bloggers form a normal distribution in what they have to say. 10 steps to financial freedom!!! lemme see that constitutes about 1,000,000 articles. Step 1 save half… time for this old cowboy to move on when I see that article, unless it’s written by Big ERN. So it’s not the nature of “blogging” that has changed, it’s the motivation and the natural skill set of the blogger that changes. The blogger wants to spend their time getting paid for their time, and the blogger runs out of overhead on his/her skill set and reverts to publishing boiler plate instead of interesting and unique content. I’m always up for reading interesting blogs and interacting with that blogger and readership. Not so much the one who’s clearly into making a million bucks or building an empire and no longer has my interest at heart. In the end it’s the reader that holds the power.
Great. As usual I’m late to the party. Lol
I may be old school but I prefer written content to audio content. It seems to be more concrete in my mind and solidify the take home points.
Podcasts can be useful when doing things that preclude you from reading (like driving or exercising) but those activities also make it less likely for me to retain the information as well as I could by resident it. That’s also why I read a book rather than get an audiobook.
I think there will be audiences that will congregate to specific media based on their own personalities and behavior. I don’t think these different media are competing but rather complementary.
I agree. Social is personal.
I’m so glad to see the conclusion. I had a scheduled post for today and I thought I would have to cancel it and find a new hobby.
I have noticed a rapid rise in non-blogging ways of reaching people though including YouTube, Podcasts, e-books, etc.
Yes. Podcasts. Who would do that kind of thing?
Depends what you want to do with your blog. People have been writing personal essays forever, whether diaries or journals, but they don’t get feedback. Newspapers have been publishing articles for centuries and accepting feedback from letters to the editor and the like, but either hired their own staffs to do the writing or screened what appears in public. Now we have in the form of blog, full access to expression, invitation to feedback, and no editor. Whether that creates freedom for the writers or anarchy for the public remains unsettled.
The biggest competitor may be social media where one can start a discussion but the audience is more restricted to designated recipients much of the time.
Good point. The democratization of media led to more freedom but definitely risks anarchy.