An article published in the New York Times a short while ago states that the number of bloggers between the ages of twelve and seventeen has been declining. The study takes this particular statistic and utilizes it to pose the question of if blogging as a whole is starting to fall out of favor and whether or not its use as an online communication tool has died. Do you feel this is the case? Is blogging, especially in the website marketing and online sales arena, dying? What will this imply for online marketers if it turns out to be true? We decided that it would be a wise decision to look carefully at this problem and find out whether or not it would actually have a large impact on the arena of Internet marketing. First of all, the statistic of kids in between the ages of twelve and seventeen blogging less doesn’t actually mean that blogging is going to go away. The simple truth is that people in this age group appear to just be moving over over to the other kinds of social media like Twitter and Facebook–Facebook, especially, since it offers its members the ability to create “notes” which can act in the same fashion as blog posts and will let the user have control over who can see what has been composed. While blogging reached the peak of its popularity in 2004-2006, lots of Internet Marketers jumped onto the bandwagon believing that they could create a site really fast that, because it looked like a blog, they could slap up some advertising and sit back and collect earnings. Most of the folks who tried this found very quickly that the only way to generate real income via blogging was to always be updating their sites with brand new information. This is the reason many Internet marketers have stopped making use of blogging as a primary income source.
Google has been working hard to discipline people who have uploaded stolen content to their blogs and sites. Every day Google is de-indexing more and more websites–typically these sites are pseudo blogs that were produced by people who use software programs to rip off other peoples’ content and use it for themselves. With a great number of blogs being yanked off the radar, you can think that blogging is dying and that these sites are just being closed down.
The genuine truth is blogging is still alive. The simple fact is that blogging is just being better regulated which makes it harder for people to earn money through these mediums. While this will affect some basic data, we predict that blogging isn’t going anywhere. It’s still coming into its own for what exactly it is really supposed to be: an instrument for communication.