The Decline of Book Blogging: The Other Side of the Issue

Recently writing about the decline of book blogging my first thought was of the process of "enshittification"--with search engines demoting such blogs in the search rankings, making them harder to find.

Of course, as a reader of this blog (thank you for being one) pointed out, this is just one side of the matter. The other side is what happened when those bloggers, being harder to find, got less traffic (with, as must also be acknowledged, the shift to social media also drawing away readers).

For bloggers--who, depending on the case, may be putting in a lot of time and even money they can ill afford into their blogs--readership matters. This is the case even when the blog is purely a matter of enthusiasm for their subject matter, and the desire to share their interest with others who also have the same interest. It is even more the case for those for whom the blog may be a key tool of publicity for some other effort of theirs (if they are, for example, an author), or even an important source of income in itself. Having their audience choked off that way means they have less reason to blog--especially if the economic side of the issue forces them to adjust their allotment of their resources.

I don't think we have far to go in looking for evidence of the consequences. Consider the number of blogs you have probably run into over the years where posting petered out, or even fell off altogether. For my part I have noticed this happening even on the sites of well-known authors who once blogged prolifically. I wondered where they went--and then, bumping into them on Twitter, found that here they are. All day, doing this, instead of that. (Indeed, they seem to spend so much time online that I wonder how it is they get anything else done--and wonder if perhaps they don't in some cases. Certainly I got less done when I used Twitter.)

So far as I know no one has endeavored to produce any comprehensive estimates. But I would not be at all surprised to find that the number of blogs which are online, especially blogs which are active, has declined--and so too the numbers of people trying to start blogs in a social media-dominated scene where the hopes of finding an audience by way of blogging may have diminished greatly.