Blogging’s low retention rate
Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
Read that one, kind of baffled me that NYT would publish something as one-sided as this.
My point of view in an editorial at the Blog Herald:
http://www.blogherald.com/2009/06/07/blog-bashing-new-york-times-on-orphaned-blogs/
I started blogging as a lark, and surprised myself by sticking with it. I’ve been doing it for just over two years now, but never deluded myself into thinking it would be anything more than a hobby.
I never thought I’d have a large readership, so I haven’t been surprised that it isn’t huge. To be honest though, after all of the growth during last year’s election cycle, it IS sort of a bummer that readership has dwindled away.
I understand the impulse to quit, and I’ve slowed down a bit (at least for the summer). But that would leave me with no hobbies, so I’ll keep going.
Great blog, thanks for the read.
People’s expectations aren’t as high as all that. I suspect most newb bloggers would be happy with just some kind of comments or feedback.
Even that is asking a lot – I’ve read some entertaining and thought-provoking stuff on blogs, original stuff, that nobody cares about even enough to comment.
Most people these days, I suspect, would rather write than read, and do neither than do either. There are more opinions out there than there will ever be an audience for.
It’s getting hard to even converse IRL with folks there days, never mind blog to them.