Many of the blogs I used to read have disappeared.
There have been numerous comments posted all over the internet saying that blogging is a waste of time. According to this story, social media makes it much easier to reach a big audience, so it doesn’t make sense in 2023 to post anything on a blog. I pretty strongly disagree with this argument (that may not be surprising when you consider that I’m making my argument on my blog). Here are some observations that make me skeptical that blogs are on the way out.
Monetizing a blog is much harder today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. A big part of that has been the disappearance of blogs from Google search results. This has led some blogs to shut down and others to move to Substack/Medium. A counterpoint is that you’re not going to monetize your social media accounts either. Moving to social media is a sign that you’ve given up on monetization. The raw truth is that most bloggers have never made a dime off their efforts, and of those that did, only a small percentage made anything close to what they’d make working a full-time job.
A lot of the blogs that have shut down did so not because there was no audience or because there’s no way to monetize it, but because they’ve grown tired of blogging. You may recall that we had a pandemic that resulted in big changes to our lives. That doesn’t mean blogging is dying, it’s just different.
Blogging has value to the writer and the reader that you don’t get with social media. Social media is for giving a hot take or telling stories. Blogging is for deeper types of writing. The long, careful writing you find on a blog is hard to replace with hot takes on social media.
Blog posts continue to be relevant months and years after they’re written. Nobody views social media posts after 24 hours. The total impact of a well-written blog post over your lifetime will be many times the total impact of your social media posts with the highest interaction metrics. I’m writing this post in 2023 with the intention that it’ll be available and discoverable in 2033. Can you say that about your social media posts, the vast majority of which are viewed by a handful of people and never get any interaction?
The whole “social media audience is big” is a nonsensical argument. If you already have a big audience you’ll get a large number of views on your social media posts. Not unrelated, if you have \$100 million, it’s easy to make enough money that you can quit your job. Most of us don’t have \$100 million and most of us don’t have 100,000 followers on social media. You know what happens if the median social media user posts something? Not much of anything. Few people will know, and most or all of those that do will not care. Social media does not give you an audience.
There’s no obvious reason it has to be hard to find blog posts on particular topics. Just because Google won’t return links to blog posts doesn’t mean there will never be an alternative. Someone will eventually solve the problem of discoverability, and it’ll make them rich.
Putting all of these together leads me to dismiss claims that blogging is going to die. I predict that we’ll see more blogging rather than less a decade from now.