What Happened to Blogging?
Blogging isn't dead, per se, but I remember in the 2010s that it was more prolific, more fun.
1. Google Reader Died
Having a daily reading list of your favourite blogs was sweet. Feedly tried to occupy this space, but I don't think it got the same level of adoption.
2. Monetization as a Goal
Many bloggers would say that they only did it as a creative outlet, but I don't think anyone was averse to accepting money (or products to review) to put out their content. The value of a blogger was the size of their audience, which begat the notion of online influence, and thus the blogger gave way to the influencer.
3. Photo/Video Influencers
A picture is worth a thousand words, so putting out photo and video-based content killed the more text-centric content of blogs.
4. Meta-Blogging
Blogging about blogging seemed to become the most common successful content. To make a course about many things you need certification, but if you've built a successful blog, you teach others to build successful blogs.
5. Social Blogging - Content Sites
Sites like Medium will host your articles making them like a magazine of sorts. It saves the costs of hosting, but you don't drive the audience metrics to your own domain.
6. Micro-Blogging/Social Media
Using social media to link back to your own blog was the way to increase views, but as the number of platforms increased, and they each needed a different kind of management, it begins to seem futile. You'll find the advice to specialize on one platform, and frankly, if you're going to stick to a single platform, why not just put the content right on there, rather than linking?
7. Social Media Algorithm Changes
These changes were usually for the worse (at least to smaller content creators), and any change meant having to re-learn how to optimize for whatever the latest incarnation was.
This article (though crude and sometimes rambling) was an interesting read that I hope to expand on elsewhere.
8. SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Like #7, this was a science/black art that needed to be constantly pursued but wasn't much fun for those who just wanted to create and express ideas.
9. Over-saturation
Too many blogs? Any topic you might want to read up on would have been covered six ways from Sunday.
10. Constant Publishing
The conventional wisdom was that to succeed you had to constantly publish new material on a regular schedule which leads to quantity over quality.
For a while at the start I had decent traffic but not really anymore.
I've never made serious money from blogging but did get several gigs through blogging, two of which paid very well.