Are Facebook and Twitter Blog Killers?

Just like video killed the radio star, are Facebook and Twitter killing blogs? Here's an interesting article over at The Economist about how the growth of blogging has slowed down and, in some countries, even stalled:

ONLINE archaeology can yield surprising results. When John Kelly of Morningside Analytics, a market-research firm, recently pored over data from websites in Indonesia he discovered a “vast field of dead blogs”. Numbering several thousand, they had not been updated since May 2009. Like hastily abandoned cities, they mark the arrival of the Indonesian version of Facebook, the online social network. [...]

Blogs are a confection of several things that do not necessarily have to go together: easy-to-use publishing tools, reverse-chronological ordering, a breezy writing style and the ability to comment. But for maintaining an online journal or sharing links and photos with friends, services such as Facebook and Twitter (which broadcasts short messages) are quicker and simpler.

Charting the impact of these newcomers is difficult. Solid data about the blogosphere are hard to come by. Such signs as there are, however, all point in the same direction. Earlier in the decade, rates of growth for both the numbers of blogs and those visiting them approached the vertical. Now traffic to two of the most popular blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, is stagnating, according to Nielsen, a media-research firm. By contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Growth in advertisements is slowing, too. Blogads, which sells them, says media buyers’ inquiries increased nearly tenfold between 2004 and 2008, but have grown by only 17% since then. Search engines show declining interest, too.

Link - via kottke


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Why do people stick to one or the other? All of my youtube friends stay inside that site and never venture over to my blog. I get some hits from Facebook, but it seems to be "lazy" traffic. I read that twitter can be used to drive traffic but i think that only works if you have 3,000,000 followers and you are on t.v.

If the internet were a restaurant, there would be no mom-and-pops. Just 3 or 4 monolithic companies serving the same thing with just a couple slight variations, like flavor of cheese. I guess we all have to eat somewhere and no one likes to eat alone..
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I had other blogs I've seen in mind when I wrote that, Alex.

The only one that I was thinking of Neatorama at the time was the "This is not neat" one. (And maybe the damn cat memes) ;)

I think Neatorama has enough variety to keep us readers with short attention spans coming back.
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I've certainly been blogging less since microblogging hit the scene. It's much easier to share thoughts, ideas & resources in 140 character posts. A blog post takes time to research & write so tends to be postponed in favour of a quick tweet or plurk on the topic.

Maybe I'm just lazy (re Vonskippy above) but I don't think I'm stupid.
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This is anecdotal, of course, but I blogged regularly for about five years, and once I joined facebook I pretty much quit. Not completely, but blogging just isn't how I spend my on-line time these days.

(Yes, leaving pointless coments on Neatorama also occupies a lot of my time.)
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