Monday, December 18, 2006
Will blogging peak in 2007?
Glenn Reynolds links to a story about a Gartner Group report that makes various predictions for the coming year, including that blogging will "peak."
Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company's top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.
The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer said. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."
That's no knock on blogging. Plummer noted that this leveling-off dynamic plays out all the time, though it often comes as a bit of a surprise when it hits things that had achieved quick popularity.
While the number of bloggers may be a highly relevant number for businesses that hope to earn money catering to bloggers, the more interesting question is whether the readership of blogs written for a general audience (as opposed to a circle of family and friends) will continue to increase. Will the growth in readership of blogs continue to take share from media businesses (or, more accurately, other media businesses)? I believe that it will, for several reasons. First, blog readership is still incredibly low. Top "general audience" blogs still have a fraction of the online readership of non-blog media, and that readership is also continuing to grow quickly. There is enormous room to grow.
Second, general audience blogs have become part of the ecology of the online media world. They are the bacteria that breaks down media content into its constituent parts and reconstitutes it into material that can be turned into new mainstream media content. This will increase the occasions on which the media drive some of the traffic they receive from blogs back to blogs.
Third, the audience -- including both journalists in the mainstream media and the Great Unwashed -- has come to understand that the distributed power of the blogosphere adds enormous value to the information available through traditional sources. Bloggers add expertise and geographical dispersion. There are many examples of the former, from specialist blogs (see, e.g., Arms Control Wonk and Real Climate, among thousands) to spontaneous networks of experts (recall the rapid integration of distributed typesetting expertise during the 60 Minutes "Memogate" scandal). Examples of the latter include permanent English-language voices in places with which few Westerners personally travel (e.g., Iraq the Model and Sabbah, which are at polar opposites on many issues), and spontaneous eruptions of blogs to cover catastrophes, such as we saw during the Indian Ocean tsunami a couple of years ago.
For these reasons and more, I think that general audience blogs will continue to see traffic increase well beyond 2007, even if the growth in the total number of blogs slows dramatically.
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