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Blogging Hits Crossroads: A-Listers Giving Up

Is blogging doomed, or just in need of new blood?

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By · February 11, 2009 · 58 Comments

An old colleague of mine used to joke he was one of millions whose job it was to “feed the internet.” This past November, an alumnus of a prestigious writing program in Louisville, Ky. told soon-to-be-alumni his blogging career was short-lived because, like a bad girlfriend, his blog constantly needed him.

Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up. Mike Arrington: handed over the TechCrunch reins to hired staff. Jason Calacanis: moved to email. Their chief complaints: fame. Too many haters, too much spit in the face.

Blogging Hits Crossroads: A-Listers Giving Up
Dan Lyons

This week’s quitter is Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer who rocketed to blogsopheric recognition because of his satirical blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, now soured on "another high-tech fairy tale." His reason: there’s no money in blogging. The day the New York Times blew his Fake Steve Jobs cover, Lyons says, “more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.”

Every tech blogger’s Silicon Valley heyday nemesis—which has reduced staff to exactly one blogger—Valleywag was quick to note Lyons scored a book deal out of his little experiment with popular anonymity. And it was well deserved. The Fake Steve Jobs idea was a well-played stroke of genius.

This crop of A-listers aren’t the first to have blog-related meltdowns. They may be, though, the first to really go and stay gone. Self-proclaimed original blogger Dave Winer is known for periodic threats to stop blogging. Yet, he still blogs. Robert Scoble, chief among the famous-for-blogging-and-I-wrote-the-book-on-blogging elite, is prone to emotional denouncements of the craft and self-imposed mental health hiatuses. Yet, he still blogs, though to a lesser degree.

Some people just can’t help it. They have to blog. Like it’s a sickness. Some are victims of their own success. Fame isn’t, by nature, for everyone, even if fifteen minutes has been edited down to five public-commentary-abusive ones. And still yet others are disillusioned victims of hype and zeitgeists.

This list of types could go on and on. There are as many reasons to blog, or not to blog, as there are people. One thing is for certain: we seem to be at a blogging crossroads. Sadly (but perhaps naturally), pivotal, transformational (and sometimes bloody) moments are often misconstrued as deadly ones. Blogging has reached a crucial moment in its evolution, one where competition for money, credibility, and attention has never been fiercer. The weak, those whose prime devotion is getting rich, getting famous, getting laid, or getting approval will be culled. In the end, as in the beginning, it’s about purity and (some type of) artistic integrity. 

When I was in the fifth grade I joined the basketball team along with 40 of my friends. I was a chubby ten year old counted among the first who would give up when faced with laps and suicide sprints and leg lifts, pushups, and sit-ups as the coaches sought to weed out the weak and uncommitted (and produce a more manageable basketball team). And, after a week, I nearly ran home to enjoy Grandma’s gravy and biscuits in my-body-doesn’t-hurt peace. My mother, though, reminded me of my commitment, and by the middle of the season—when the coach had become fed up with his starting fast little waifs—I earned my starting forward position and never felt better about myself.    

Blogging, I think, is at a similar moment in its development, a moment all writers (and other content producers) must struggle through until they form a key component of their wills that says never give up.

I find it interesting that as soon as negativity about the economy set in, especially among those tech bloggers who thrive on bubbles and print journalists suddenly out of a decent-paying job who are forced to turn to blogging or dry cleaning, the negativity surrounding blogging also set in. Not enough money. Too many haters. A waste of time and energy. All hype no delivery. A cause of undue stress, obesity, and myocardial infarction. These were the same people, back when that bubble was still good and cozy, once so jazzed about The Secret, this century’s remake of Norman Vincent Peele’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

True, the average blogger pulls in a mere $5,000-$6,000 per year, and that average is obscenely skewed by the top one percent of bloggers pulling more than $200,000. True, there are more abandoned blogs than active ones. True, content in a world that values cheap, short, and easy has been reduced to embarrassing values (I saw one ad on craigslist offering $1.50 per “article”). True, there is worldwide competition for diffused and dwindling ad dollars. True, there has been a deluge of marketers, spammers, and professional bloggers (a.k.a. writers) and “mainstream” media types pushing out the wild and wooly (and unreliable and piggybacking and libelous) amateur, citizen journalists. True, viewers, readers, and fans can be nasty.

 

Blogging Hits Crossroads: A-Listers Giving Up

 

 

Welcome to the media business.

The good stuff lasts, the chaff separates from the wheat, the cream rises to the top, all that. The earliest bloggers and the self-sustained content producers may not like the idea that the blogosphere is changing and will require an old law of media: Content is king, but the king answers to his god, the network.

Save for a few shining stars (think, using radio as an example, Howard Stern an Rush Limbaugh and their hundreds of millions) and stellar independent publications, the network is what will save the blogosphere and content producers. It’s always been tough for individuals to make it in media without a network behind them, paying them good (even great) wages to produce, while the network aggregates and sells content and collective audiences to advertisers.

Like it or not, the corporation is going to have to enter the blogosphere, and by irony, will ruin it in order to save it. Luckily, unlike the past, there will be wider avenues via user-generated media for quality content producers, so long as they have the passion and will to walk those avenues. Besides, writers write, bloggers blog, regardless.
 

 

 

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There are 58 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. Our motivation is to change public opinion, and influence the electorate. Thus, making money is far less important.

    Rightwing Blogs are thriving right now. And I’ve seen a drop with the Leftwing Blogs since Obama became President. The inspiration, motivation and the hits are now on the Right: Libertarians and Conservatives.

    Eric Dondero, Publisher
    Libertarian Republican Blogspot

  2. As a legless amputee recluse in a foreign country, blogging is my only means of communication with anyone and other than just talking to myself, it is my way of putting my views across and logging my life. I enjoy writing in my blog and I do not do it for money and whether or not anyone finds it and reads it today, it will still be there for people to read as long as I am around.

    Blogging ad infinitum

    The Legless Fool

  3. I can’t say that I understand why people blog. I guess it’s like writing in a journal or diary…but I don’t do that either. Every once in a while, I will reply to an article that looks interest or if I really feel I have something to say. I guess I just usally don’t have much to say.

    Ejvind mentioned to much clutter in the cloud. I think that might be true. I have a tendency to get easily distracted when I’m working on the internet. So much absolutely useless information!

    So, to those that enjoy blogging:

    If it’s your passion, continue!
    If it’s not, retire!

  4. Blogging needs a lot of attention and updating. Otherwise, your site would be outdated and less visited.

  5. There are still those of us who blog to change the World and not for money.

    A blog is very cheap or next to free to maintain, the most valuable investment in a blog will be the time you need to maintain it.

  6. Good, thought provoking post.

    I wholly agree with Patric above. Blogging takes a lot of time, hard work, etc. I post about once a week. But there is daily effort behind that post.

    I suppose if the goal is money directly from the blog, then very few would blog for very long.

    About the haters… never really understood that as I reason to stop. The first one that I knew of who did that was Salam Pax. (Now returned at http://salampax.wordpress.com/) Didn’t get it then or now. But perhaps that’s because I’ve not been in that position.

  7. The people who are out purely to generate hits and count the pennies trickling in, they will not weather the storm- they will get bored. They will leave the blogosphere (still my most hated word) and hopefully, the rest of us, who do it for the love of doing it, can shine that little brighter.
    It galls me that in most directories and searches, my blog sits behind several which are generic ‘splogs’ offering nothing at all new or original, some of which are rarely or never updated, or are so only from RSS. Hopefully, these will wither and die…

    If you do it for the love of it, to share your thoughts or things that you’ve found on te web that you truly want to share, that is true blogging, and that will always survive.

    It just won’t make the pennies trickle in…

  8. Eugene
    Reply

    Nice article. With advertising revenues drying up this year, it seems that we’ll either lose more a-listers, or there’ll be more consolidation and network formation. But that seems like a reasonable trade-off in order to maintain some semblance of integrity.

    Consider the alternative. You could do what Arrington does … charge for a favorable story about a business. Hey, it’s a dirty way to make money, but how else is a blog going to maintain its “independence”? And we wonder why the poor guy got spat on.

  9. people have been giving up on online systems for as long as there have been online systems, this is, somehow, news?

  10. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm book discusses the adoption of new technology. The early adopters, “Bleeding Edge” people, thrive on the newness and potential for opportunity. Thank goodness for them! Yet, once any technology reaches the main steam it isn’t nearly as fun, fresh or new. I hope the A-List bloggers will dive into the next new thing. They are important trend setters.

    Andrea

  11. Thank you for this well-thought out and insightful article. Why blog? Why write? Why bother? Why care? Being a writer first (a writer who cares about research and accuracy, as well as trying to be clever) and a blogger second, I think it was only a matter of time before some in the field let it go. Blogging is very consuming–but so is journalism. Focusing on saying something rather than always trying to be the first to say anything, should be more important. The Internet has changed forever how we get the news and that in turn has changed politics and the economy. No one can hide for long. Keeping up with every new fact and nuance is exhausting, never mind writing about it all.
    Perhaps blogging is simply evolving. This format will always be here. It just may be a little different. And maybe a little better.
    Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

    http://klaatukafe.blogspot.com/

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    http://reviewsofpetproducts.blogspot.com/

    http://onlinebookblog.blogspot.com/

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    http://onlinefilmclub.blogspot.com/

    http://cleaningcafe.blogspot.com/

  12. Blogs are good for marketing your sites especially business opportunities and adsense. But I have rarely blogged even though I am into internet marketing.
    I just dont have the time or cant be bothered to blog, but I do enjoy reading some of the articles on blogs, some are very informative and you can learn new ideas from them.

  13. Timo
    Reply

    Nice of someone to come out and admit that blogging is a waste of time and effort….I closed down my blog months ago because even updating only once a month was not worth it in terms of visitors to my site or in revenue from the advertising on my blog.

    Similarly social bookmarking sites like Delicious are also a waste of time as all that happened was that people searching for my chosen keywords found that my bookmarks were more accurate and relevant than Google so they bookmarked all the relevant sites I had found but never mine!

    Social networking forget it too, it’s fun and I have made a lot of new friends around the world, and some just 1 mile from where I live, but visitors to my site? Virtually none!

    As for Twitter forget that too, my chosen and favourite search terms don’t even give any results at all on Twitter and I have better things to do than send short messages (I call them Twits)into cyberspace in the hope someone will eventually find them!

    If you really want to drive traffic, write some articles, make them readable and fun, make them regular, and try and include your search terms or synonyms into the text (but not too obviously), you will soon get a following and even get emails if you are late publishing! Don’t forget to link from your site to the article as well!

    And still nothing beats the good old fashioned press release if you have something really special to say, even if you use a free service like PRLog!

    These two last techniques have given me first page on Google for the last three years, and even if the links are not direct to my site they point to one of my articles or press releases. In fact for certain combinations of search terms I get the top 10 on Google every time either direct to my site or to an article.

    Lastly if you really want to drive traffic to your site, get a web camera and leave it run 24/7/365, submit it to some of the worldwide web cam sites (they are all free!) and make sure your domain name is on the caption just in case the site doesn’t link direct to your actual page. People view them just to see what the weather is like and if you have a nice view for them to look at so much the better! I get up to 5000 visitors a month to my site this way and many of them go on to explore my site, click on the Adsense ads on the web camera page, and even visit my Amazon bookshop and buy books!

  14. Many of us don’t blog for the measly pennies that trickle in from adsense. I’ve been blogging for about 2 plus years and i think I’ve made $50.00. Iblog because it’s a means to vent, enlighten, share.
    It does take way too much time, and I’ve found that I am blogging more on a site that pays me per post, but I can vent and enlighten there, as well.

    It would be wonderful if one could make money doing what one loves, but in this day and age.. ‘aint gonna happen.

  15. I read the article and my jaw drop. How can you get 1.5 million visitors to your blog and only make $1000. The mind is in a spin.
    He needs to take a good look at his formatting is what I say. !.5million uniques. WOW

  16. I fall into the average blogger category and I’ve met more nut cakes than I can count over the last 2 and half years blogging. I cut off communications with everyone on the Internet (that I don’t actually know in “real life.”)

    The social aspect of blogging was far too much for me to handle. With millions of readers I can’t even imagine the crap that the A-Listers have to go through. It definitely wouldn’t be worth it. I can see why becoming an A-Lister is a short lived dream.

  17. “The good stuff lasts, the chaff separates from the wheat, the cream rises to the top, all that. The earliest bloggers and the self-sustained content producers may not like the idea that the blogosphere is changing and will require an old law of media.”
    I totally agree with that.

  18. Why would you ever rely on only Adsense when you’re getting 500k impressions?

    That’s just plain silly…

  19. I’ve tried to shut down my site more than once, but I keep coming back. For some reason I feel the need to continue writing. But it does suck not having very many readers, haha. Especially since I take time to craft the content and make it high quality.

    Making money on Adsense is a bit of a mystery to me. I’m not sure it makes rational sense. You do everything you can to get traffic to your site… and then let readers get lured away for a few cents. A quarter if you’re lucky. A dollar if you are really lucky. From a hobbyist point of view, its kinda fun. But good luck making a living at it.

  20. My kid blogs at 12 so the whole blogosphere as changed. More kids are becoming more vocal online, which is not a bad thing. There’s a whole lot of exchanges of ideas online.

  21. In this era, if you don’t blog, you’re the odd one out.

  22. It’s a matter of time before things starts evolving.

  23. I don’t think blogging is a bad thing, some people may be fanatical but then you have a choice whether to read it or not!
    If someone enjoys writing about money, or mortgages or their cat, they are allowed to post it online, why not!..

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