By Some Measures, Blogging May Be Peaking

At two separate events over the past week I expressed that blogging may be peaking. Now before you run to the phone booth to call your editor, I don't mean that it has peaked in influence. Hardly. But if you read the tea leaves behind some key statistics, the intensity of blogging may be plateauing.

Let's start with the last State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati. FIrst, the good news. The number of blogs jumped to 57M. That chart still looks like a hockey stick. However, the more critical bellweather of blogging's vitality - daily posts per day - looks like it may be cresting. We still need more data to be sure.

OK now that's just one metric. Let's look at another: the relative traffic of blogging platforms compared to other places where people can express themselves. If you take a look at the chart below you'll note that TypePad's traffic has flattened. Blogger's continues to grow but not as quickly as it once did. Meanwhile Wikipedia and YouTube traffic continues to skyrocket. Despite all of the caveats about Alexa's data, I still feel it's good for comparing sites to each other. It's a great way to say , Gorilla A vs. Gorilla B - who's bigger.

Now let's look at searches for the word blog on Google? This is perhaps the most interesting data point and it seems to fly in the face of the others. Interest in blogs - at least the singular version of the word - is continuing to climb as are media references.  However if you take a close look at the chart, searches seems to be flattening while news citations are climbing. They doubled over the past year.

So what does this all mean? To me it says that we might be at the point where every individual who wants to publish a blog actively may already have one. However, press citations continue to climb. So blogs continue to remain extremely influential. There are countless anecdotal examples over the past several years that demonstrate blogging's impact in shaping how the media covers news.

Further, traffic and participation on video sharing sites continues to rise sharply. So, while blog volume may be peaking (I underscore that we still need more data), online expression is evergreen. The center of gravity will always shift as technology gives us new powers we didn't have before and new communities pop up. Regardless, brands will need to participate in this world in order to stay in the spotlight and remain trusted. The channels, however, may change with the times.

Comments

[NYCA]

I wonder if this means that blogs have hit the mainstream in terms of content expectations. They've formally taken the place of most personal websites and as you've said, there is a saturation point?

Michelle Edelman is a Director or Strategic Planning at NYCA, a full-service marketing agency that grows businesses with inspired ideas. To find out how NYCA can grow your business, log on to www.nyca.com.

[Rex Hammock]

I may have to take you out to the statistics woodshed on this one, Steve. One shouldn't use measurements of one set of people (those whose actions will be picked up by Technorati or Typepad traffic, a self-selected tech-savvy sample) and draw conclusions about another group (ordinary non-tech people) like "everyone who wants to blog has one." You are bravely going where statisticians and economics fear to tread by interweaving data on two disparate issues (YouTube traffic vs. TypePad traffic) and concluding the two are correlated in some competitive way.

[Trevor Cook]

Rex is right, but the info is still interesting and thought provoking especially the technorati statement that blog posts per day is cresting. I believe there will be a lot of churn in blogging with a lot of people taking it up and then dropping out to be replaced by others and that only a small percentage will keep blogging. Blogging will always be an elite sport but much less elitist than traditional media

[Andrew Denny]

Beware of judging what people mean by the word 'blog'. Maybe a year or two back it meant a weblog. More and more it now seems to mean what I'd call a 'blog post'.

"I'm going to do a blog on my blog".

[salesstrategy]

I heard only 55% blogs are active. Anyway, at the rate it is growing, it is literally unattainable to read everything that relevant to a topic.

[wioota]

Visual analysis of data is perilous and I'd wager that visual extrapolation is even more so. Still, diggers and the blogging-reading public at large consume numbers like pigs do truffles :) I think that Blogger has plateaued due to stagnation. The upcoming version currently in Beta may see a return in growth for that platform.

[Wayne Smallman]

"Beware of judging what people mean by the word 'blog'."

That's my concern, too.

That's like looking up the word: "car" and jumping to the assumption that each instance represents someone who's in the process of looking for a car to buy.

While I'm sure there's plenty of growth left in 'blogging, might it be that the word has got out and the initial buzz has fizzled a little?

Also, there's such a thing as business 'blogging, which tells you that the market is maturing...

[Dr. Pete]

I hope what we're seeing in this data is that the low hanging fruit is all but picked for the people who are blogging opportunistically. 2005-2006 were definitely bandwagon years for people hoping to build easy traffic and make money from blogging. A slowdown in that fad would be good news for those of us who take blogging seriously.

[Joseph Hunkins]

No! Steve this is a great preliminary sketch but little to suggest a peak here. If you look at longer Alexa periods the trend is clearer and upwards. Also should note Wordpress which is growing fast. IMHO the best measure of the peak will be when you see blog content stop being so tech-weighted, which reflects the early barriers to entry that are now going away.

[Graham Jones - Internet Psychologist]

Steve, this is interesting info, but there may be other factors taking part. Many blogs are no longer blogs - they are just incorporated within a web page or a site without it being labelled a "blog". Equally, people are influenced to start blogging by several factors. One of those is what else is happening in their life and work. At this time of year, blogging is low down on priorities compared with shopping and parties...! I would guess you would see a similar drop off in web site creation during November/December. (There are slight dips at the end of each year in the graphs you show.) We are almost certainly in the "early adopter" phase of blogging which would suggest there would be a tail-off in the trends before a massive rise in interest. So I suspect blogging hasn't peaked; this is only the beginning. Much, much more is to come - assuming blogging follows the same pattern as other trends.

[kob]

Your stats are a good springboard for discussion, but I would argue that blogs aren't "peaking" and never will. It's like saying evolution has peaked.

Blog communities, especially local blogging communities, are continuing to grow and specialize. There are, for instance, more people blogging today about DC neighborhoods then one year ago.

I am also seeing a growing list of blogs that have reached a two-year mark and longer.

What we're seeing, instead, is a slow maturing of blogging. The tools and expertise are increasing, more and more people are investing serious time in their blogging efforts, and more diverse groups are beginning to participate.

With all this said, we're still very much in the primal soup stage of blogging; the impact of self-publishing has yet to be realized.

[Jordan Frank]

I would hazard making a call on a peak just yet. The number of blogs is still increasing at a rate of 100K+ per day. The daily posting volume seems to show a peak, but Technorati analysis indicates their splog filters are getting better and better, so the number of real blog postings may still be increasing while the splog postings decrease, creating the appearance of a peak.

The real measure to track, if available, would be daily posting volume over consistently active blogs. Also of consideration ought to be myspace and other community site "blogs" which server an identical personal publishing purpose. This would filter out experimental tinkering and include blog type content, wherever it appears.

Let us hark back to the craze in personal home page publishing in 1998 which flattened out and dropped like a rock around 2000 (generally when ISPs started to charge for home page sites, and some sites went out of business). That precipitous drop signaled the importance of the web and continued fast growth in web sites, web utilization and so forth. It also preceeded the webification of intranets, which is now starting to more seriously take hold as personal publishing tools like blogs and wikis bring intranet publishing to the Nth user in the enterprise. I see my customers producing 1000s of pages in a year or even a month, quickly eclipsing the size of their intranet sites to date.

I think we can expect to see a drop in blogs or blogging, but that will be a good sign, not a bad sign for personal publishing in general or in the enterprise context. It will mean that the products and services offering the ability to publish have matured, the use cases solidified, and a real ecosystem has begun to mature and become valuable.