Did you know that there are more than 2 million blogposts shared every single day on over 500 million blogs (hostingtribunal.com, 2019)?
And did you know that around 77% of internet users read blogs daily (Carlson, 2018)?
When looking at these numbers, blogging appears to be a huge business. And with the transition of blogs as diaries in 1994 to what they are today, they also seem to be increasingly important for all sorts of topics (Gunn, 2019).
But there is another side to this.
With the launch of the video-sharing platform YouTube an entirely new trend has been introduced to the internet: Vlogs. The term vlog is short for 'video blog'. Nowadays all sorts of information is shared as a video rather than a blogpost or at least in addition to it.
Additionally with the introduction of the first iPhone and social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram the way we consume data and spend our time has changed tremendously.
In fact, the average user picks up their phone more than 1,500 times a week and therefore spends around 3 hours and 16 minutes on their phones each day.
Constantly being bombarded with new information has also had a heavy influence on the attention span of a human being. From around 12 seconds in 2000 it has now dropped to 8.25 seconds, which is considered shorter than that of a goldfish (Digital Information World, 2018).
As one can imagine, reading a long blogpost has bascially become impossible and an average web user will only read up to 28% of written text on a website (Digital Information World, 2018).
So does blogging even make sense?
In short: Yes!
Even though the statistics sound a little devastating at first, there is also other data that provides some hope. And even grabbing the attention of a goldfish is possible.
For example by breaking up a text into paragraphs that vary in length it is easier for the consumer to read it. In order to ensure that the reader still gets all the necessary information printing important words and phrases in bold can be the way to go.
Nearly 70% of users say that a blog adds credibility to a website and blogs are considered a trusted source of information (Whittemore, 2017). So especially from a marketing perspective it absolutely does make sense to have a blog.
And in addition a blog is basically just a way for you to showcase whatever material you want, in the way you want to. So as long as you make sure to keep up with the times (eg. adding videos to your blog, making it mobile friendly), blogging will have a future (Kelly-Barton, 2018).
What do you think? Does blogging have a future?
Until next time!
References
Carlson, D.J. (2018) ‘77% Of Internet Users Read Blogs’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.djohncarlsonesq.com/77-internet-users-read-blogs/ (Accessed: 23 November 2019)
Digital
Information World
(2018) ‘The Human Attention Span [INFOGRAPHIC]’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/09/the-human-attention-span-infographic.html (Accessed: 23 November 2019)
Gunn, D. (2019) ‘The History of Blogging:
From 1997 Until Now’ [Online]. Available at: https://themeisle.com/blog/history-of-blogging/ (Accessed: 23 November 2019)
Hostingtribunal.com (2019) ‘How Many Blogs Are
There?’ [Online]. Available at: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-many-blogs/ (Accessed: 23 November 2019)
Kelly-Barton,
C. (2018) ‘The
Future of Blogging’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.hostgator.com/blog/future-blogging/ (Accessed 23 November 2019)
Whittemore,
C.B. (2017) ‘The
79 Latest Business Blogging Statistics’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.simplemarketingnow.com/content-talks-business-blog/business-blogging-statistics (Accessed: 23 November 2019)
Thank you for this point, i find it very interesting and refreshing that you have such a positive input on how blogging helps people and consumers reach information in a efficient and good way.
ReplyDeleteI do think that blogging is changing form into something that we don't really see as blogging but sure has some striking similarities to it, even if we now call it vlogging or posting on instagram my stories. Theese vlogs are still in many cases very dependent on having a blog where you can reach out with your video and make it more versatile and informative by adding text. And in a marketing and business perspective it is much more time efficient to write a small blog post to make sure that you "spoil" the consumers and get as many people interested in you vlog before even posting it with some few striking words.
Thank you very much for your answer and your opinion on the topic.
DeleteI absolutely agree with you on the fact that blogging is changing. I believe that it will always be somewhat necessary in certain areas. But of course other information can and probably should be provided through a video, to make it easier for the customer.
So let's see how this thing we now call blogging evolves and hopefully follow along to the changes.
Malin.