Why Blogging Gets No Love (And Why You Shouldn’t Care)

June 25, 2012 Author Adam Singer In Blogging

Blogs get no love in the current digital landscape. In fact, blogging has gone from being everyone’s favorite “is dead” meme to simply being not talked about at all.

Seth Godin made an eloquent argument years ago why this is actually a good thing. But I think some things have changed since that post, so today I’d like to go through some of the reasons why blogging gets no love (and then my answer why you shouldn’t care).

Here we go …why blogging gets no love:

Blogging is difficult, and our world is lazy.

Everyone talks about new shorter-format services such as simple image sharing / tagging sites, micro content, etc. because they’re adopted faster and at greater scale. Blogging was already adopted, and still is, by smart people who have the patience and passion to dive deeper into subjects and the readers who care. The thing is, our society for the most part doesn’t celebrate what’s difficult. We want easy and instant gratification and that’s why users flock to services which provide it.

Media know that blogs monetize — and they all use them.

A majority of the “blogging is dead” stories are written by (wait for it) media outlets, on their own blogs. This is because the stories attract pageviews and attention, but also on some level I think many media outlets would prefer less competition.

Think about it: end users can’t monetize when they build on other people’s platforms. When you control your own site, you are able to monetize in whatever manner you want instead of engaging in digital sharecropping that benefits others (but not you). All of us should be compensated for our work and that’s a beautiful thing blogs have enabled. But media would much prefer to hype platforms that benefit them (such as social networks / link sharing sites) instead of platforms competing for visitors. It’s just not in their interest to talk about blogs in the same way one magazine wouldn’t write about competitive magazines. Simply put, blogs have matured.

A new wave of start-ups wants your time and prefers you give them your content, free.

The younger generation will have grown up conditioned to give up their content and ideas — for free — to others who have built platforms designed to take it. And for this, these users may get a wonderful experience but their ideas will generate revenue for a select few. I grew up in a world where this wasn’t a great option (I’d rather have my own domain than a Geocities page). I adopted WordPress in 2005 and never looked back, it was (and is) a wonderful self-hosted CMS that lets you monetize and own your ideas. Will the younger generation get to a point they demand sovereignty or will they be fine with trading their time and ideas for services?

Why you shouldn’t care…

Even with this, I don’t think you should care if blogging gets no love. It’s proven and works for many reasons. I still think it’s a great time for businesses, entrepreneurs or hobbyists to develop their own self-hosted blog and use it to plug into every network and device: from Google+ to Twitter, to email and mobile platforms. After all, with the explosion of social and mobile much of our digital experience has become a problem in search of a solution.

The point of the stream is not to talk about itself, it’s to find ideas and stories to use as a springboard for discussions. You can be the starting point in a unique space that’s all your own, or you can simply be another voice in the chorus.

image credit: Shutterstock