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


Interesting. As a blog reader over the years, I've gone from visiting the actual blog sites to igoogle's RSS, to Google Reader and dupe some of the Reader subscriptions with Facebook "likes" so they show up in my FB newsfeed.

As far as Facebook blog reading, I prefer blog reading on Google Reader. The pictures are bigger, somehow I read more of the blurb and am more likely to click through. Maybe it's b/c Facebook is more fun for friend stuff and the blog updates there are automatically less fun. And then with Reader, I'm just scrolling through blog posts.

For people who never bothered with RSS, I bet Facebook and Twitter are their first means to seeing regular blog updates, so I can see social networks helping blogs get more readers.
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I think a lot of this boils down to user-friendly formatting. I was very into having a blogspot humor blog and collecting great artwork, videos, etc. I found more and more that it was just a lot easier to use the pre-existing template of my Facebook page to post and share things that I liked rather than having to copy and paste embed codes and fix the size of the video window, and check the blog then open it back up and do formatting changes.
I think the more professional/magazine style blogs that have a strong umbrella concept are great just as they are, but for more personal small scale blogs, it does become just easier to open up a "business" Facebook account and start blogging.
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Most people are lazy and stupid (in that order) - so yes, anything that will herd that demographic of sheeple onto the easy path will certainly gain a significant amount of follows.
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Before I quit Facebook, I started getting in the habit of doing what I do for TLB on there, like Ross said, easier. It also cheapens the experience, and Facebook's data miners get to slice a little bit more, so yeah. It's lazy AND you get pimped.
FB/Twttr are for people who just want to share without exposition. I'm going to keep blogging, because sometimes I have something to say that needs more than 140 characters.
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There is has been a general fall of blogging since 2007, even though I did initially take this news (when I first became aware of it in 2008) with a pinch of salt, I think that it is better that way.

See, most of my internet use is on blogs. I have 3 blogs (2 of which I update regularly) and I am an avid reader of blogs. The problem before was that there were SO MANY blogs full of random junk, just masses and masses of personal photos of dogs and cats with no real content.
I'm not saying that personal blogs are useless or boring, but rather that there must a good purpose behind a blog, rather than just random whims to write about your boyfriend.

It was this mass amount of junk which made me stop reading blogs and revert to random internet usage. But now I find that there are many many incredibly interesting sites with wonderful content which are in a blog format (look at Neatorama itself - it is in a blog format too). So I don't think blogging is over, in fact its better to have fewer quality content, rather than masses of junk.
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Neatorama is a blog? Who knew?

It makes sense that blogs will die out. People are fickle, and will latch on to the next thing that comes along. Any dolt can start a blog. It takes creativity to make it a good one.

Her's my Top Ten list of things that will kill a blog:

Articles that have no substance ("The sky is blue" stories)
Articles that are simply cut-and-paste from another site (plagiarism)
Poorly written articles (anybody can string words together, but not everybody does it well)
Poor grammar or spelling (this one wears you down over time)
Lack of new or interesting information (a lot of repeats, or sometimes a subject is simply exhausted)
Articles that don't fit with the blog's premise (I see a lot of "this is not Neat!" comments here lately)
Political slants and crazy people (including trolls)
Advertising (especially diet ads)
Tiresome memes
Top Ten lists of stuff
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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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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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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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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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