The golden age of blogs is long behind us, and there's a school of thought that blames Google for this. Specifically, it blames Google for cancelling Google Reader, the app that nearly everyone once used to read blogs.
For some of you, that paragraph makes perfect sense. For others, it might as well be in Greek. So let me explain as briefly as possible.
All blogs, including this one, have an RSS feed. RSS is an independent standard that broadcasts the text of a blog (and other forms of web content) in a common format. An RSS reader is an app that pulls in that content and displays it. After the death of Google Reader I switched to NewsBlur, which looks like this:
I use NewsBlur only for blog reading, but there are plenty of other things you can also use it for. As you can see, it keeps track of all the blogs I've told it about and tells me if any of them have new posts since the last time I checked. This is very handy since it means I don't have to scroll through all of them periodically just to see if they've posted anything new.
Anyway. As I said, Google Reader was the de facto standard for reading blogs back in the day, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth when it was canceled. But was that responsible for a decline in blog audiences?
I asked that question on Twitter yesterday, and the consensus was "Meh. Maybe." But people also pointed to other things. There was the period when many of the most popular bloggers turned pro. There was the upswing in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Maybe those were more at fault.
This got me curious in a navel-gazing sort of way. So in bloggy fashion, I went to Google Trends to extract some data that might or might not be a good proxy for blog popularity. Here's a chart showing Google searches for the topic "blog" since 2004:
If we assume that this really does represent blog popularity, we can say a few things about the decline that started in 2009. First, my recollection is that the peak years for bloggers turning pro was around 2005-07. But blog popularity continued to increase for several years after that. So that's probably not the cause of the decline.
Google Reader is an even worse fit. Blog popularity had already been on a downswing for more than three years when Google canceled it in 2013. It obviously can't have been the initial cause of the decline.
Social media is harder to get a handle on. Twitter is an unlikely villain for a downturn that began in 2009, since Twitter just wasn't that popular back then. Facebook, however, fits pretty well and provides a platform for blog-length musings. It's clearly a candidate.
But you can't look at this chart without noticing one other thing: The decline in blog popularity starts almost precisely when George W. Bush left office. It was Bush and the Iraq war that popularized blogs in the first place, so it would be sort of poetic if his departure marked the beginning of the end for blogs. Maybe blogs just lost their mojo when their favorite punching bag flew home to Texas.
Or it might just be a coincidence. Personally I find Facebook the most likely culprit.
But there's one other question left hanging: Google Reader might not have been responsible for the initial decline of blogs, but why was it canceled? It was a pretty low maintenance product and could have easily been kept around. Nobody at Google would even have noticed it. In a similar vein, Facebook and Twitter have reduced their support for RSS even though it requires very little effort to maintain. Why?
The most likely answer to all these questions is that RSS broadcasts content directly to users. There's no way to monetize it, and it cannibalizes users away from platforms that want to be your sole hub for news aggregation. Google wanted its users on Google+, or at the very least finding the news via search, which generated ad revenue. Facebook wanted you to read a news feed full of ads within their walled garden. And Twitter wanted to be the place where news broke first—but only if you were actually on Twitter.
In other words, RSS was a threat to practically every platform that aggregates news since it allowed users to decide for themselves what news they wanted to see—and to see it without passing through a gatekeeper. The best way to eliminate this threat was to eliminate or reduce support for RSS, as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all done.
Blogs were just collateral damage here. An RSS reader is the only decent way to read a collection of blogs, and with the demise of RSS and Google Reader it became more difficult to follow blogs. Sure, lots of people switched to a different reader, but lots more didn't know how or just never got around to it. And with that, the decline in blog readership accelerated. This was the start of a vicious cycle that opened up opportunities for Twitter, Medium, YouTube, podcasts, Substack, and other platforms that increasingly replaced blogs as the place for web-centric conversation.
Maybe. It's a plausible story, anyway. I just don't know for sure if it's true.
"The most likely answer to all these questions is that RSS broadcasts content directly to users. There's no way to monetize it" - Ding, ding, ding! Winner!!
Google Reader was great when it dead I went to My Old Reader instead, but they're a subscription based Reader, as I would guess most RSS feeds are now.
There was no way Google could have gone to that model ("what? I used to get if for free, I'll find something else!!11!!!") so easier to sunset
I might also add that, IIRC, Reddit came into its own about this time. I believe Reddit became a major goto site about 2011.
Most of my news/media consumption is still RSS-driven. I follow pointers to Twitter, but do not log in more than about every third year.
I block Facebook's address space at my router and on my phone, they do not exist on my internet. I don't use other social media.
Yes, I'm a dinosaur, but I've been one since USENet was ambushed by AOL back in the 90s. I came from the pre-commercial internet, and do not accept a lot of the demands of newcomers.
"The golden age of blogs is long behind us"
Don't conflate quality (Golden Age and such like) with audience size...
As someone who doesn't care if they're labelled a snob, I think it's much simpler -- blogging is not a medium that appeals to the masses, in the same way that opera is not a medium that appeals to the masses.
The value of blogging is in allowing a smart person to present their understanding of a subject. This presumes that the reader cares about understanding a subject, even to the extent of changing their mind, and that they are willing to read a few pages to this end.
That's a very small fraction of the population. Most people, even the college-educated, aren't interested in learning anything new, just in being told that everything the already know is correct and perfect.
And so we get the mass media and Facebook doing what they've always done, telling you that you are correct in all your beliefs.
We get Twitter presenting new facts -- but not the coherent arguments that make the facts interesting (and possible disturbing).
And we DO have blogs remaining for the few people who, as I said, care about truth more than theology. Kevin's blog is one. People like Alex Danco and Byrne Hobart provide very interesting content, usually beginning in finance but veering off all over the place. No-one can ever replace Scott Alexander. And so on.
Any individual doesn't need the whole world to be blogs (or their preferred medium); I don't understand the obsession with that. Once there are enough blogs to cover your time (just like once their are enough books, enough movies, enough songs, to cover your tastes) why do you need any more? What would you do with them anyway?
I like this answer. At least somewhat. The biggest problem with it is that there are lots of people whom I would like to see writing blogs, but instead they just post on Facebook.
Oh, BTW, Feedly is a service that acts like an RSS reader. I've been perfectly happy with it.
Yes, you have to pay for it as an annual service. If this upsets you, maybe you ought to think through the fact that Google Reader was canceled, and try to connect the dots...
You have to pay? That's news to me. I switched to Feedly because that was kind of the default alternative to Google Reader (it picked up all your subscriptions from Reader, without you having to do much).
I have never payed a dime, and it works nicely; probably better than Google Reader ever did (of course, it had time to improve over it)
Free Feedly apparently has a limit of 100 feeds (though I currently have 101).
I am an old-time blog reader and can remember a lot of blogs from the "golden age" circa. 2003-2007. I never learned how to use any RSS reader. I simply had a folder of bookmarks for blogs I visited on a daily basis, Calpundit among them.
To me, it was absolutely a combination of social media and shortened attention spans that killed blogging. Blogging with its "comment, wait for reply, wait for the counter-reply, etc." is slow. A lot of interblog discussions took days to unfold. Facebook and its "likes" and comment style allowed discussions to unfold in minutes or hours. Same with Twitter and its likes and re-tweets. Social media and shorter attention spans.
I'm still deeply unhappy about this. Every day on the internet I am reminded that it is now built not to serve me, but to serve the big money interests. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way.
For instance, I would so love to have a button that means "I've seen that and I hate it and I never want to see it again". But no such button exists, nor will it ever exist, in spite of probably being to the benefit of both myself and the advertiser/content creator. Because it constrains the middleman. The internet was supposed to be about cutting out the middlemen, but now we have a new crew of them.
I think one contributing factor is that "I'll just put it on Facebook" is a good-enough answer for most people whom I would rather see posting things on blogs. But that puts their content inside the Facebook silo, which I despise (among other things I despise about Facebook).
As you say I don't think the end of Google Reader was a big factor in the decline of blogging, but I do think it's really important as the moment when the internet and tech companies more generally started making everything worse instead of better. Remember when "don't be evil" was a semi-serious slogan and not a joke? The end of Google Reader is the clear end of that era when there was still a utopian flavor to the internet.
I always attributed it to the end of GWB. The OBama /HRC blog split didn’t help. I stopped reading anyone of the hysterical HRC nut jobs. The other thing was the turning pro and the departure of people like Bilmon. My two cents. Thank goodness you have remained Kevin!
Funny that the PUMAE all turned into MAGATS or BERNERS.
Almost like those motherfuckers were always just contrarian dickheads with comfortable enough lives that the winning candidate in the general election wouldn't matter to them.
Podcasts would like to have a word with you.
But, first, Pearl Jam...
Full disclosure: I started my blog in 2004 and I still bemoan the demise of blogs in general -- although my blog is still going, sort of.
Just from personal experience, I'm gonna put the blame on Facebook. That's where all my bloggin' buddies went, gradually at first, and then all at once. It was easier to "share" other things they found on the internet, there was no need to design your site, choose colors or layout, and you could handily block anyone you didn't like. Facebook has "like" buttons, making it unnecessary for anyone to put their thoughts in cogent form as to why they agree or disagree with you.
As a blogger, you were kind of expected to make sense: make a statement, elaborate and expound, draw a conclusion. As a Facebooker, you could get five times as many hits just posting a picture of your breakfast burrito, no thinking involved. For a long time, no one I knew considered the price they were paying in personal privacy, as Facebook repeatedly violated that space.
Some people (me) still try to write little essays on Facebook, but nobody ever reads them. I always get more action with cat pictures. And last year Facebook discontinued "Notes," the one blog-like feature it had, and deleted everybody's Notes.
I don't blame "professional" bloggers. They're just bloggers. In my experience, the amateur bloggers (back in the Golden Age) wrote just as insightfully, and I followed both types.
Personally, I blame Zuade Kaufman but my initial reaction was registration. The golden age of blogging had no registration or reply ability. I do not even know what RSS is or ever used Facebook or Twitter, but the ascendance of social media could also be an explanation. Another reason for the decline of blogs is many popular bloggers were co-opted by other media. Market consolidation must also be considered a reason why blog popularity has declined.
"It's the comment section, stupid!"
Coral, if you're nasty.
For me, Blogs are still good...there are more of them than I can read and the quality seems better than ever.
What I have not seen mentioned is the real value of the comment sections under most current blogs...while there can be a uniformity of opinion, almost all comments sharpen the ideas presented...this is a real good and service to readers.
The real problem with blogs and spells their decline...TL/DR...(too long, didn't read.) (a related question...has the internet actually changed our brains?)
It also takes real dedication on the blogging side...it is hard work to do what Kevin so well does...for adding to the general welfare of the body politic Kevin and his likes are to be saluted.
Best Wishes, Traveller
In addition to the numerous reasons already mentioned, for me personally I would say the demise and seeming abandonment of Disqus as a universal commenting platform was a big factor in me following fewer blogs in recent years. At its peak, it was integrated into a huge number of sites and therefore provided a really convenient way to seamlessly and anonymously comment on sites as diverse as The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Washington Monthly, and, of course, Mother Jones. Of those, only WM still uses it. Perhaps even better than the commenting feature, however, was its newsfeed function, with which the headlines and first sentences of articles of followed sites were collected into a uniform interface -- it was in essence a basic RSS reader. This made it incredibly easy to keep up with favorite sites, and the addition of commenting support gave it an interactive appeal over the normal RSS reader.
It certainly still exists, but only in a very broken form with much of its earlier functionality lost. I can only conjecture what happened to it, but I suspect it got crushed between its own, perhaps overly aggressive attempts to monetize its service and the efforts of the sites utilizing it to monetize their own sites. Whatever the causes were, I no longer have this convenient way to slip back and forth between my favorite sites, and the loss of the ability to comment on most sites meant there was less social incentive to motivate my interaction.
It was pretty damn close to perfect for a while, but as usual, money seems to have fucked everything up.
Being a standard means anyone could produce an RSS reader. Of course to get that Buck Rogers there must be some bucks somewhere to pay, however much or little, to produce and maintain it. Either bucks in the real sense, or in the “time and inclination” sense. If that depended on a single implementation from a sole source then frankly that model was at best brittle.
It seems that you're focusing on political blogs, but there are all sorts of other types of blogs out there. I've been blogging on WordPress for ten years, more or less. I have multiple blogs, and what I've seen is, regardless of the topic, the audience for blogging has declined. My main blog, which is a little bit of everything -- food, politics, music, whatever I feel like writing about when I post something -- gets very little interaction anymore. When I first started blogging, the blogging community was more vibrant, more involved. there were more reads and comments. Now, there are no more than 10-20 people who ever really effectively engage with anything I post.
I also have a blog where I post my fiction. When I first started that blog, there was a lot of interaction with other writers who also blogged. Now, almost none of those people are blogging anymore and as with my main blog, there are only a few people who ever really engage. I also recently started another blog with a few other wrtiers -- it's an effort to discuss writing-related topics and provide support and ideas for other writers. In about three months of activity, we've been almost incapable of getting any real engagement from anybody.
What I think has happened is that other forms of social media have taken over. There is a huge "writing community" on Twitter, although I think a lot of it is "look at me" more than actual engagement with others. Same for a lot of things on Twitter, of course. And Facebook morphed into something more than connecting with friends and families.
Add into this also the never-ending attack on our attention spans. People would rather engage with a 280 character tweet than read a 1,500 word post. It's frustrating for those of us who want to say things and engage in things in more than the superficial way other social media channels allow for.
@kingmidget
Kind of echoes my own thoughts on the subject. The decline is real and irreversible, but I'd like to see your blog...
My main blog is kingmidgetramblings.wordpress.com.
Perhaps one of the problems with getting more traffic is the fact that your blog is not responsive; most people nowadays browse using their cell phones, so this is a determining factor. Today, all themes on WP.com are responsive; for those who like to write a lot I suggest the Libre 2 theme (obviously, try it out on a website just for that).
I never ever got into using RSS readers. During the blog heyday I only read four or five (tops) regularly, and it just didn't seem such a big deal to visit the blogs themselves periodically.
Am I the only one that has just gone to a ding dang web page all this time? I really don't find that particularly onerous.
I never used a reader. I literally just went to a dozen blogs everyday by remembering their URLs.
I can only speak from personal experience. I used to write for a political blog in Australia that had a reasonably large readership. It blossomed as a protest site against Australia's involvement in the Iraq invasion, and subsequently against the right-wing Howard Government more generally (including its mindless support of the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern military adventures). The government lost the 2007 election, Howard lost his seat, and I simply didn't have the energy to keep up a writing project that had no connection with my paid employment. There was an "Our work is done" kind of feeling.
Another even more widely-read Australian blog folded afterwards for the same reason, and a few smaller ones faded away. Others are still going. Blogging in Australia was mainly a way for progressives to fight back against the relentless right-wing propaganda published by the dominant Murdoch media. One reason it has become less popular may be that the Labor Party, when it got into government, disappointed the hopes of many of us on the left. Howard's defeat didn't mean the new dawn we had imagined it might.
The Australian left sounds not all that unlike the American fleft that spited Obama's stab in the back by sitting with their thumbs up their ass in 2010.
BTW I noticed the other day that 'Hot Air' has been experiencing a steady loss of traffic for months, which accelerated last September. It's down more than 35% over six months. It may be that if you don't embrace extremism, you don't attract a crowd.
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I totally forgot about RSS readers. I stopped using them 2 1/2 years ago. I first switched from Google Reader to Feedly but then they decided that they were going to mess with your feed and put ads everywhere. So then I moved to The Old Reader. But I slowed down and eventually stopped, after spending more time on Twitter.
After a blog that I used to frequent shut down I discovered some blogs that were created by past commenters in an attempt to continue the blog community they were once members of. Many use Blogspot, ie Leftist Politics, and reprint articles form other sources which they then comment on and send out links to others in hopes they can create discussion and/or flame wars. Disqus Refugees uses Squarespace and the same method. Some eschew moderation and encourage newomer while others immediately censor comments that do not conform to their attitudes. Websites like The Hill and Mediaite generate tens of thousands of comments a day on a steady stream of articles. The large amount of comments these websites generate disallow the type of commenter communities that developed in at blogs and what these other sites try to recreate.
Established media websites have also eliminated their commenting options. I have not seen a NYT comment option for quite a while, and The Atlantic shut their Disqus commenting down a couple of years ago.
These days I spend a lot more time listening to podcasts than reading blogs - including podcasts by people whose blogs I used to read!.
Listening does not require the same focus as reading - I can listen while driving or doing chores, and it's often more entertaining. But both media have their place,
I wonder if how graph of the rise of podcasts would track vs. the decline of blogs?
I never used a reader.
I have been law-blogging and tweeting since 2009 (in Germany), late to the party.
I think Twitter is less responsible for the downward spiral of the blogging culture,
and I use twitter for advertising my blogposts.
This would be my guess: facebook PLUS podcasts are the reason for the decline.
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I used google reader all the time. When it shut down I went to Feedly which is okay but I liked google reader better. I still use Feedly for my favorite blogs including yours but I use it much less because of SmartNews. I wonder if that has anything to do with declining blog reading. The only thing about SmartNews is you need to be aware of bias based on the publication because it gathers news from all over the internet. But I like it because I come across stories I might have missed. So does anyone else think SmartNews in addition to Facebook accelerated blog reading.
Blogs were declared legally dead the day Washington Monthly chose Chris Matthews over Nancy Le Tourneau & Martin Longman.
At least we still have David Atkins.