I explained yesterday at DonaldSensing.com why I am discontinuing posting there, although the site will remain online for several more months at least. For the foreseeable future, all my postings will be here at WOC, whose founder Joe Katzman graciously extended blogging privileges to me last summer.
My thesis is basically this:
-- Single-author blogs of national-interest topics such as the GWOT, politics, religion, etc., will find it increasingly difficult to gain and maintain significant readership numbers. Team blogs, such as WOC, will come to predominate simply because of the labor intensity high-readership blogging requires. A solo writer trying to keep a site refreshed and original enough to keep two thousand or more reader interested every day faces a terrific burden. I know, I did it for a few years. Team blogs spread the labor and therefore can offer more content of higher quality.
-- Michelle Malkin's new team blog, Hot Air, has set a new standard that high-readership blogs will have to follow if they wish to remain high-readership blogs. Its outstanding layout and design and fantastic audiovisual integration make it the cutting edge blog now. Her daily “Vent” feature is short enough not to postpone viewing, can be downloaded in movie form to iPods and has a high production value. Blogging in general will have to follow her lead and sites that don’t will be fighting for ever-smaller readership numbers.
So is there really a future for an Army of Davids? Or will would-be Davids find themselves getting squashed by blogging Goliaths?
Ms. Malkin's site indicates, I think, that blogging has started to move away from its “amateur hour” status and is now at the start line of becoming professionalized. While the financial costs of converting my site into this “new wave” kind of site would not be great (the software and equipment are surprisingly cheap and for podcasting, for example, are actually free), I simply don’t have the time or inclination to dive into it. Like a gazillion other bloggers, this is a hobby, not a living.
The vast majority of blogs have low readership now, and by that I mean in the dozens. I’m not trying to demean those blogs; they are obviously important to their authors and readers. But the vast majority of readers, as well as the ad money that blogs will increasingly generate, will continue to revolve around fairly few blogs.
That won’t matter to niche bloggers focusing on single topics such as gardening, cooking and the like. But those kinds of topics are too narrow to draw high readership numbers day after day. We might consider milblogging, politics or religion niches, but they happen to be niches of high interest to millions of people. They are also niches of deep significance to our society at large, including people who don’t read blogs at all but are influenced by them. Hence, blogs that focus on those topics (and there are other topics, such as sports and entertainment) will by their nature draw higher readership than others.
I think that the labor intensity of maintaining high-readership, solitary-author sites will diminish their numbers. Bill Quick invented the term blogosphere years ago and was one of the early solitary bloggers, very successful, but now his site is a team blog. James Joyner started solo, built a much larger readership than mine, but now his site is a team site. Ditto with Winds of Change, for that matter.
There certainly will be lone-author blogs that will thrive. Instapundit is pretty much on automatic pilot. But as writers who are already well known increasingly start their own sites (i.e., Michael Barone) they’ll garner more and more of the reader pool.
Blind Mind's Eye observes,Despite protestations ... the blogosphere is in fact dominated by a number of large blogs, and the little guy has little chance of making an impact on a major scale.Single-writer blogs are not going away, but the vast majority of such blogs finally get discontinued (this has been reported many times in the blogosphere, based on data from Technorati and other tracking sources). OTOH, team blogs live much longer and tend to grow readership. If you want to write about model-airplane flying, go for it and have fun. Just understand it’s a small reader pool for you. But if you want to blog about topics of national interest, I think you’ll find yourself increasingly increasingly competing with team blogs whose authors are not continually under the posting pressure you are and whose content will overall probably be higher in both quantity and quality. When these blogs start to migrate to the media integration such as Hotair’s they will become even more attractive to readers.
It reminds me of the difference between the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed sheer inventiveness of the Florence early phase of the Renaissance as compared with the soberer perfection phase played out in Rome. While all roads lead to Rome, I myself have always been drawn to the wild-west thing. It was great while it lasted.
Huffington Post had good production values, too. That isn't going to be enough. But your time and energy point is the key, and sustaining that for long periods of time is very hard.
One thing I would advocate - many of your posts are linked elsewhere (including here), and I would strongly advocate that you do NOT take them offline but leave them up.
Talk to me about arrangements if your current hosting situation is problematic in some way.
"Huffington Post had good production values, too. That isn't going to be enough."
No, you also have to have something to say!
Thanks for the offer, Joe, but hosting isn't a problem. If I do not revive the site I may want to migrate it to a cheaper host, though. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to migrate the WordPress files, though. But all this is months away.
When and if you decide to migrate, you should be able to do so without disturbing the links that Joe mentioned above. If you migrate your domain name (which shouldn't be a problem due to its eponymous nature), copying over the database and whatnot shouldn't be a problem. I'd be happy to help unless someone better and more energetic comes along.
I agree that consolidation is the trend, just like in any other industry. However, what could reverse what you are saying is blogging search engines. If people just want posts by a particular person, or on a particular topic, then there is no need for loyalty to a URL like Windsofchange.net or DailyKos.com.
If Donald Sensing writes a post once every 48 hours, an engine will merely inform me when he has posted. Whether it is at DonaldSensing.com or Windsofchange.net will not matter.
I made Kesher Talk a group blog too. It's great to fire it up and see three posts in a row that I didn't write. Not only that, my co-bloggers bring their own styles and areas of interest and it makes the blog more than the sum of its parts.
I guess we should start thinking about pod-casting and posting video . . . .
I'm curious though as to why you singled out that one point that I made. I would have thought my suggestion that the blogosphere is more like a republic (leaning a bit toward the platonic republic) than a democracy, would have been more interesting.
C'est la vie...
Btw it is Blind Mind's Eye.... ;)
A question :
If you have a group blog in which you invite others to blog, do you draft up legal documents to clarify ownwership stakes, etc?
This is not just for the Google Ad revenue (if a significant amount), but if a blog is actually an asset with a cash value. I think we are not far from the day when major blogs will be 'businesses' with valuations, that could be bought, sold, or borrowed against like other businesses.
Do major blogs with many regular commenters usually make such legal arragements?
Dunno. I like individual blogs because you can really get an insight into the way an person thinks, and comprehend his arguments at a different level from what you would get by reading occasional posts on a group blog. Given that the time and effort to go from one blog to another is minimal, the case for aggregation doesn't seem overwhelming to me.
Need to think about it some more.
The other kind of aggregation (RSS) is perhaps also a factor. I don't know how much of one. If most readers are disinclined to use it, probably not much.
I think I'm different, but my readership has gone from around eight or nine hundred a week to well over 6,000 over the past year and a half. I think that some blogs are unique and unless their goals are to be the biggest and brightest, places like Belmont Club, Betsy's, Schultz's wildly creative Curmudgeonly and Skeptical will always have readers.
You are also unique and I don't think you have to blog every day to be effective. While I too like Katzman, I've never been an everyday fan.
Great post, Donald.
I guess it all depends on why you are blogging. I blog because it is fun. If it is not fun -- for instance if there is a week or two that I don't have much to say -- then I don't blog. If people come by to read, that's good. If they don't, heck with them. I don't run ads, and I'm not trying to start a mini-text news and commentary service, I'm just writing in my blog.
But your post gets into the "business" of blogging, a concept which has really just taken off over the last few years. In that world, yes, a team is the only shot you have at consistant quality content. I'd also consider a Lexis-Nexis subscription and a couple other things. You certainly want a better layour that some "Joe Blogger" like me has.
I think goals are important. Are you trying to get the most readers possible? If so, why? Money? Then you might want to join a group with a narrow focus. A good continuous marketing campaign is also a must. People "buy" the combination of the topic and the personalities, so I'd guess having a good team mix and content generation is critical.
Finally don't discount the value of old posts! My blog used to get a boatload of readers when I cross posted on some of the major boards (like /.) and then I didn't write much for a while. What I find, looking at my server logs, is that I'm still getting a fair bit of traffic from old material. These readers sometimes read more current material and/or try out a RSS feed. There's probably a good strategy in there somewhere. Blogging definitely has the same quality as building a snowman. Sometimes you feel like you're just rolling that little snowball around in the yard for no reason at all. And if you're trying to build a 40-foot snowman, it's an entirely different thing from a small one in the front yard.
Rev, I read your post yesterday when it popped up in my RSS reader. Which means that I saw your writing even though I haven't visited your blog in the weeks since you stopped posting. RSS does give the single-author blog a way around the onslaught of group blogs.
When these blogs start to migrate to the media integration such as Hotair’s they will become even more attractive to readers.
Readers, Donald? I visited Hot Air based on your recommendation, and watched some video, and was less than impressed. Not by the production values or content or such-like, but by the passivity involved in it. It was watching teevee, which I can do anytime I want, and rarely do unless it's a ball game of some sort. So, I'll take a pass on the video and audio stuff. We've already got too much pointless talking-head light and sound in the world. Typed blogs, group or individual, give me a whole lot more to chew on for my surfing dollar.
None of this is to say you're wrong about group blogs or v-logs or podcasts. Just that from my POV, that dilutes the power of the blog, which in a way, is probably inevitable. Such is life.
Understanding that you're aiming for a smaller pool is key...
Heck, I'm a medievalist who uses his blog as a combo of regular blog, plus linkfarm for places I like to visit on a regular basis. My original basis for starting one at all was so that I had an easy portal to the online things I cared about.
That, I think, is increasingly going to be the trend for blogged constellations. Imho, our blogrolls are going to have fewer links in them, more of which will be larger, semi-or-pro developments, with a side stable of smaller, very specialized niches.