The Life and Death of Blogs

Posted on | January 21, 2012 | No Comments

Organizing my Google Reader blog RSS subscriptions this evening, I realized just how many of the blogs I used to read have fallen by the wayside. In one case, the blog’s author died. Another blog fell off the rails when the blogger succumbed to his drug addictions. Most of the blogs just stopped publishing for far less dramatic reasons.

In some cases, the blog always had a definite end in mind. A blog about being unemployed ended when the blogger got a job. Another blog about being an ex-pat who moved to Vancouver dried up after the writer had pretty definitively covered every aspect of his transition between the USA and Canada.

In other cases, the blogger just ran out of steam. A blogger who wrote about their personal life surely hasn’t stopped having a personal life; they just stopped feeling the need to document it. Another blogger who wrote about American politics similarly would not have run out of material; but for whatever reason, their passion died.

Blogs die all the time. It often happens when the blogger doesn’t have another reason besides passion to keep going. Bloggers usually need something behind a sheer bloody-minded writing urge to keep the blog alive:

Financial incentive. Whether you’re being paid to write the blog by a client, taking Google ad revenue or using your blog as a marketing strategy to bring in customers for a business, money is a big motivator to keep blogging. Heck, money is a big motivator to do anything. (This is also a reason why some of my clients keep me on as a blogger on their site — they’ve lost the passion to keep blogging, but they don’t want to lose the revenue they get from social media marketing).
An engaged audience. Particularly when bloggers are starting out and not getting a whole lot of attention, the isolation can be really demoralizing. If a blog manages to engage its audience to leave comments and share links, and traffic seems to be growing, a blogger will keep up the hard work in the hope of even greater reward and attention.
Collaborators. Getting friends and colleagues to contribute to a blog doesn’t just help keep the blog fresh. Being part of something bigger also imposes certain psychological obligations. Now you’re not just writing for yourself; if you don’t write your heart out, you’re letting your team down. With community blogs, you can also have a kind of succession. The original blogger who started the thing moves on, but the blog takes on a life of its own beyond what the prime mover foresaw.

It’s a little bit sad when blogs die, but no more than when a magazine or television series stops production. If there’s an audience, a blog will emerge to cater to it. When the audience’s tastes change, other blogs will rise up to cater to them. An online version of natural selection takes place in a world of ideas. There will be death. There will be life. But so long as you take care to update your Google Reader to keep track of all the new stuff, at least it’s always interesting.