Yesterday, just for fun, I read a bunch of articles online about whether blogging is dead. I guess my interest was provoked by this article, already two years old, about the end of Technorati’s blog-rating directory. The article explained Technorati’s quiet, no-fuss decision to shutter what used to be their #1 service:
In recent years, however, it struggled to stay relevant as the landscape shifted and social media enabled anyone to have a voice on the internet without starting a blog.
Aha! So there it is! Facebook killed the blogosphere. And then after that, Instagram killed the blogosphere. And after that, Tumblr and Periscope and Medium and other sites that I haven’t even heard of.
I started searching for other articles on “Is Blogging Dead?” and found basically two kinds. A small number said that blogging is dead. A larger number said that blogging is not dead but it’s changing. Nobody wants to be a “blogger” any more, they want to be an “influencer.” Writing is less important, social media and multimedia are more important, etc.
After reading a few of these, I realized that they were talking about a completely different world from the one I live in. They were talking about blogs as a way to make money. There was and still is a whole industry or ecosystem of (for example) cooking blogs that provide advertising for food products, or mommy blogs that promote baby products. Many of these started as labors of love but morphed over time as companies realized they could get good word-of-mouth advertising from bloggers, and bloggers realized they could actually make a little money.
Apparently, so the articles say, that kind of blog is falling on hard times, as the number of page views decreases and the comments section dries up.
I’d like to reassure my readers that I have seen nothing of the sort going on with this blog. All the credit for this goes to you! The number of comments has seemed nice and steady over the years, with the occasional post provoking more discussion. For example, my recent post on “black and white” got 15 comments, not counting two of my own. As for page views, here are the latest stats.
| Year | Posts | Page Views | Views per Post |
| 2010 | 84 | 39463 | 470 |
| 2011 | 92 | 32579 | 354 |
| 2012 | 117 | 53869 | 460 |
| 2013 | 106 | 47764 | 451 |
| 2014 | 95 | 50941 | 536 |
| 2015 | 93 | 56545 | 608 |
| 2016 | 41 | 26461 | 645 |
(Note: Data on 2016 through July 20 — slightly more than half the year.)
Last year was my most-viewed year ever. This year the total number of page views has dropped a little, but that’s partly because I have not been writing as many posts. I apologize for that; I’ve been working on a book this year, so I have not been playing in tournaments and I have been paying a little bit less attention to top-level grandmaster chess. When my book is finished I assure you that I will be able to put more energy into chess.
Although I’ve been writing fewer posts this year, I think I have actually been putting more effort into each individual post, and I’m gratified to see that people still want to read them.
So what does it all mean, in the grand scheme of things? I think that the doom-and-gloom articles overlook the fact that there are still plenty of blogs out there that never tried to monetize, that simply remained true to their original concept as a labor of love, as one person wanting to communicate to others about topics of mutual interest. They are blogs where the writing is still the point, not “multimedia” or “influencing.” These blogs are the dragonflies and beetles of the Internet ecosystem. While other blogs were evolving into gigantic dinosaurs and then going extinct, the little beetle blogs have stayed who they are and have kept on going.
Another way to measure whether blogging is dead or not is to ask whether anyone is starting new blogs. As it happens, one of my chess friends, Salman Azhar, has just started a new one this month, which I hope some of you will check out. It’s called Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, and the best description I can provide from the first few entries is that it’s about the challenges of living as a law-abiding Muslim in the U.S. It’s really eye-opening, and you’ll see that it is related to some of the things we were talking about in the comment section on my “black and white” post.
Once again, thanks for keeping this blog going by your comments and your visits! You can be assured that there will never be advertising on this blog, and the only reason I would ever stop writing it would be if I ran out of things to say about chess.
