So the New York Times is running a story about how most blogs have a flurry of posts at the start and are then left to rot like a bad crop of vegetables. The article includes a Technorati statistics saying that only around seven million of the 133 million blogs they have indexed are updated regularly, and at that only about 100,000 blogs generate a sizable number of views. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.
First off, it has always been the case that the big newspapers get way more readers than the little newspapers. The internet has only exacerbated this. Comparing the well trafficked sites to the little guys is like comparing campus newspapers to the Wall Street Journal (which is getting worse everyday). The TechCrunches of the world are the new version of widely circulated newspapers.
One big factor behind why so many blogs start and fail so quickly is because people don’t write about interesting things. The fact that Livejournal is the name of a blogging site helps to illustrate this point. Most people simply write about what’s going on in their lives, such as how they’re really happy with their new video games or how their boyfriends are jerks. While this sometimes draws an audience, it more often than not takes a branching out to be successful. BoingBoing is essentially a big list of the stuff that its authors have been reading online, yet they’re so successful because they find interesting stuff and catalog it. The key word here is interesting.
