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Maybe the blogosphere's a bubble
Update: Before reading the rest of this post, note that Dave Sifry at Technorati has already challenged the calculations cited in it, and posted a comment explaining his numbers. Does that make the discussion any less healthy? No, but my post here may make it sound as though the bloggers challenging Sifry's math were right, and that's not certain. Now, back to your regularly scheduled post ...
Rather than take recent stats on the seemingly relentless growth of blogs at face value, Matt Galloway and then Scott Karp got out their slide rules.
They found that splogs -- Weblogs that scrape and copy content from elsewhere to derive traffic and incidental ad revenue -- represented all the reported growth and more. In other words, "real" blogs aren't growing at all anymore. The number may be shrinking.
Yes. Shrinking. Karp says why he thinks it's happening:
Consumer-created media takes a lot of time and energy  unless we develop economic models to meaningfully compensate the long tail, the ego payoff for most people won’t be enough to justify the effort. The cost of entry to create content is low in terms of dollars, but the cost of sustainable content creation is very high in terms of time, which in this short life is our most valuable commodity.
Open markets have a way of purging the excess  the long tail will shrink as people go back to their lives, making high quality content less of a commodity. Perhaps the bubble in media will deflate itself and, as happened with the last bubble, the best brands will survive and ultimately ascend.
I spoke up saying I expected this to happen -- a foolish sage at best, though, because I said it would occur in 2004:
The number of actively maintained Weblogs will not continue to grow at as rapid a pace as in the past 18 months. ... A majority of the people who are most interested in and most capable of maintaining Weblogs already run them. So new entrants to the field are more likely to be personal-site hobbyists or curiosity seekers.
Hobbyists quickly learn that it's a lot of work, costs money and often provides little glory or reward. ... Even pros running specialty blogs sometimes update in fits and starts. I've noticed, for instance, that many of the design-oriented Weblogs I follow did not update nearly as often in the second half of 2003 as the first. ...
Further, I think the Weblog format itself -- most recent quip at top, integrated comments system, all the characteristic features -- will gradually fold into other forms of content management and presentation. Mainstream news sites, for example, are adding bloglike sections alongside their standard, hierarchical headline indexes.
If these guys are right, or even just alert to a trend that may not be playing out as fast as their calculations indicate, I wonder what the impact might be on the corners of the blog universe where people push hard for new social media and applications.
Both blogs
[...] Item: Small Initiatives Blog Archive » Maybe the blogosphere’s a bubble. [...]
Thanks for the comments, and certainly the discussion is healthy, but all of Matt's and Scott's analyses were based on a flawed analysis of the data - that the State of the Blogosphere numebrs were GROSS numbers, including spam. In fact, those numbers are NET numbers, which means that all the subtracting they did was a double counting.
So while I agree with you that the blogosphere can't continue to grow at the pace it is currently experiencing - I mean, there are only so many human beings on the planet - I think it is too early to say that the blogosphere is in fact shrinking.
Dave
I almost always question stats on the blogosphere. Often, the stats don't take into account the numbers of blogs that are actively maintained on sites like LiveJournal and Myspace.com--mostly because those blogs are only relavent to the communities in which they exist. There's not much "reporting" or "great content" on those blogs--just people conversing in order to build and maintain extended communities.
The idea of community, for many who use those features, extends beyond their local geographic area and gets them to exchange ideas. In essence, their blogging is a way of relieving a certain existentialist anxiety that comes about in a media-saturated enviornment.
Although I must disagree with you about those who most capable are already running them. That's a bit elitist and doesn't allow for the notion that not everyone who is smart, relavent, etc., was an early adopter. Out here in Western Mass, there are many people, including myself, who came to blogging within the past six months to a year, who are providing unique viewpoints about our worlds. And who knows--there may be others, in other parts of the world and the country, who will create great blogs within the next six months.
Whether or not we get noticed, though, when the signal to noise ratio is so high, might depend on how much time and effort we are willing to put into expanding our blogging communities beyond our peers. If bloggers take the notion that blogging is peer-to-peer communication, perhaps more will be as assertive as myself and leave comments on blogs of bloggers who, in the visceral world, would not necessarily be our peers. But chutzpah is probably harder to measure than the creation of splogs :-)
David: Thanks for clarifying, and as I said, I'm something of a foolish sage for having forecast the peak of blog growth more than two years ago.
Tish: Nothing elitist intended in the remark you mentioned, also from my 1994 "forecast." In fact, I put two conditions on it: most interested and most capable. Certainly, some of the best potential bloggers aren't yet blogging, and perhaps will never choose to.
Thanks to both of you for stopping by.
Um, I mean 2004. If I had forecast the peak of the blogosphere in 1994, that wouldn't be a foolish sage, it'd be a freakish one. ;-)