mendax.org

Jacqui Cheng posted about the overall blogosphere population slowing its growth, while profit-for-blogging has gone up. We find both those facts rather unsurprising, and pretty sensical given how young mainstream blogging is. And “mainstream” is the key word here, because while blogs like mendax.org have been around for over a decade, the barrier-of-entry for would-be-bloggers in the past has been fairly high. It’s only in the past several years that domain names, web hosting, and ultimately the blogging tools themselves have become widely accessible (and in many cases, free). As these changes happened gradually, the rate of blogging naturally went up over time, until we’re at the point we are today.

Similarly, the ability to capture revenue from a blog is a fairly new aspect of blogging. While ads were sold on blogs for many years, before Google Adsense and similar operations, the opportunity to easily sell ads just wasn’t there, and only larger enterprises had the readership to sell ads directly for any realistic revenue.

Today, with blogging so easy to get into, the reason many blogs die is simple: either the authors lose interest in the blogging fad fairly quickly, else they’re drowned out by all the other noise in a given readership market. So while a blog about an extremely niche topic may survive and quickly build a readership, more general niche subjects will be covered by too many people for anything but exceptional blogs to last for any reasonable amount of time. Just look at blogs dedicated to World of Warcraft (WoW) for a perfect example: most provide information that too few people care about, else are too redundant with one another to matter. Without a very unique element to them, these blogs fall into obscurity.

There’s also the matter of well-tuned blog enterprises, or in simple, multi-author blogs. These blogs are able to churn out more content, on more topics, thereby consolidating readership effectively. There’s a reason blogs like WoW Insider have become the go-to source of information for a game like WoW, and with a quick readership build-up, ad revenue becomes very promising.

Where does that leave the future of the blogosphere? More blogs with authority, more multi-author blogs dominating the landscape, and overall less new blogs due to the shininess of blogging wearing off, and increased competition because of the aforementioned rise of more multi-author blogs. Of the many deserted blogs out there, we expect many of their authors to ultimately use micro-blogging services to vent about their parents instead, so while the noise on Twitter may go up, the blogosphere as a whole will be better for it.

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