What are they good for?
This thought was prompted in the short term by a friend’s remark in a Facebook discussion that “I remember blogs” – followed up, when I enquired, by “#obsoletetechnology” – but I’ve been wondering about it for a while in the face of a steady decline in the viewing and visitor statistics for this one.
This isn’t a passive-aggressive demand for affirmation; I don’t feel entitled to an audience, especially when my posts can mostly be characterised as “self-indulgent and random”, but rather am genuinely interested in the reason(s) why the aforementioned self-indulgent and random posts (which have not noticeably changed their character over the last few years) are now much less popular than they were. No, nothing I’ve written has been picked up recently by a powerful influencer like Mary Beard (generally good for a couple of thousand extra views), and I haven’t picked fights with any writers of popular history (at least a few hundred) – but comparing the last six months with similar fight-free, influencer-disregarded periods, the decline is unmistakable.
I’ve published three things in the last week, on different topics, and am still struggling to hit viewing figures that, a year ago, were normal for periods when I hadn’t published anything for a while. Something has definitely changed. Audience tastes? The style of this blog hasn’t changed, but maybe that’s the problem, as people want to read about different topics or prefer different styles. General crisis of the humanities, or crisis of Classics in particular? Or is it a wider shift in communications technology and patterns of consumption, so people just don’t read blogs so much any more?
It would be interesting to hear about other people’s experiences, as writers and readers. My fuzzy and unscientific sense, based on my impression of discourse on the Twitter, is that more people seem to be publishing longer pieces in curated web magazines or via sites like The Conversation, rather than having their own blogs – but I’m not sure if these are bloggers who have switched medium, or people new or writing for wider non-academic audiences who have decided that this is more straightforward than trying to keep a blog going. And of course the people I follow on the Twitter are certainly not typical of the wider public, who may all be sticking to traditional media brands, even if now online, or alternatively getting everything from some new platform I’ve never heard of.
If so, that does feel rather sad. As a writer, I love blogging, for the freedom to write about anything I feel like, however I wish, on the spur of the moment and in response to current events or to whatever I happen to come across; it’s immediate, without necessarily being ephemeral, and it keeps me writing even when my days are hectic and fragmented. And as a reader I love it equally for the random thought-provoking post from someone I’ve never read before and probably never will again and for the opportunity to get to know a writer over time in many different facets.
And blogs are really, really good for certain kinds of things. Does the world need a book on, say, Brexit and Classics? I don’t think so; there’s not enough material to support a serious analysis of classical reception (and it’s only classicists who will believe for a moment that any of it is significant), while attempts at drawing lessons for Brexit from antiquity will inevitably be trite, polemical, both, or at best – the use of the Melian Dialogue, obviously – just an instance of a wider phenomenon (Thucydides illuminates everything), rather than specific to Brexit.
Rather than the would-be totalising discourse of a book, even a multi-author book, what this topic needs is blogging: multiple perspectives, describing different analogies (Syracuse! The departure of the legions!) and promoting them or criticising them, polemicising from different positions, engaging furiously with one another, varying between serious academic analysis and humour and satire and personal reflection and snark. Which is pretty well what we’ve already got, if you put together the range of blg posts from people like Mary Beard and Edith Hall, articles in the New Statesmen and the Spectator and on the Politico website, and my interminable rants. Maybe all that’s missing is for someone to pull together a handy collection of links with limited commentary, like the annotated bibligraphies that Eidolon has been producing. But an old-fashioned book is simply the wrong medium.
Technology is one of ways in which I feel – as pretty well everyone does, some time or another, for different reasons – slightly out of time: just too old to have properly got the hang of computers and the internet so always a ‘digital immigrant’ and always catching onto trends when they’re already passé, just too young to be able to feel relaxed about this. I always had the sense when I started blogging that I’d already missed the best bit; like I’m really getting the hang of the technical possibilities of the scroll when the cool kids are switching to the codex.
Twitter is great, for many things, but too short-form (even with 280 characters) for much of what I want to do. The problem with podcasts and vlogs is that they need a chunk of free time for the recording, whereas I can write a blog in little increments over a few days – and the fashion for vlogs seems to have risen and fallen over the period of me acquiring some equipment and trying to get the hang of it. If anyone can actually tell me what the next big thing will be, I’m more than willing to consider it, just to have the feeling of being ahead of the curve for once – but only if it can offer me something of the genuine joys of blogging…
If fellow bloggers read this, I’d be very interested to hear how you’re finding things these days – and if you’re reading this, you’re a reader of blogs by definition, so arguably an even more important source of evidence for what’s going on. I make no promises whatsoever of taking any notice of feedback, so you can forget about the fan petitions to make future posts adhere more rigorously to canon, but I would be keen to hear how my experience relates to wider cultural trends.
Sphinx 
Hello Neville,
when you say: “so people just don’t read blogs so much any more?”, I think this is right in the sense that people are reading less generally. I found myself doing this, and as an avid reader, I’ve tried to correct this trend in myself. Blogs for this have been great, and I’ve found myself over the last 3 or 4 years reading more, not fewer, blogs. From you, but also from many other academics, when I’ve wanted a better perspective on a subject. This has mostly, but not exclusively, been Brexit-related, but the simple fact of reading something (anything!) that makes me think, reflect and learn, is still, and will always remain, a pleasure. One thing to consider is not to concern yourself simply with the metrics. So fewer people are reading you? So what? People come and go. Fashions change – as Oscar Wilde said “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” What remains is a quality – and it is that quality that I Iook for. So what if others are doing fancy vlogs? What you are trying to put across does not work easily in vlog form – so don’t try and compete with those who are doing it (and in some cases very well). Personally, I like your musings just the way they are. Please continue to make me think and learn.
Thank you! It’s nice just to get a comment – one thing I deliberately didn’t mention above was the interactivity of blogs, which I’m sure was supposed to be part of the point of them, but in my experience has been sadly limited. Anyway, yes, you may well be right that there’s a general decline in reading (there must be people who research such things). I’m not proposing to give this up, and it’s not about chasing viewing statistic – but at the same time it is about wanting to communicate, and so there’s a balance to be found between making an effort to reach people and making too many compromises to what I actually have to offer…
Thank you for writing this very honest piece. I haven’t managed to write a new blog post for over six months and my lack of motivation certainly has something to do with declining readership so I can relate to a lot of what you are saying. I think that part of the problem is that there is now simply too much content competing for our attention both online and off-line so that people just don’t feel they have the time to read blogs – you are right that online magazines have more status making it hard for blogs to compete. For me – and it feels like a slightly risky thing to admit – knowing that such platforms, by default, reach a bigger audience only adds to the frustration since the difference in readership is by no means always proportional to the quality of the content. For example I often enjoy reading Mary Beard’s columns – and they are easy to read because she always manages to keep them short, something I struggle with (see this reply!) – but they are essentially blog posts and they must get thousands, if not tens of thousands, more readers than many other blog posts that are equally good (some by people you mention, some of your own) simply because they’re in the TLS. The same goes for all the online magazines and that realisation only adds to the sense of frustration of seeing my own blog traffic sinking.
I think, however, that another big problem is that the way social media works has changed. I used to get most of my readers through Twitter and knew that if I tweeted about a blog post it would be guaranteed to get retweeted and the post would be read. Now, however, because of the way that Twitter has changed how its feed works (promoted tweets, likes showing up as well as RTs, “top tweets” first etc.) posting a tweet often feels like throwing a very small stone in a very big lake and seeing it sink without so much as a ripple on the surface. It’s now a much less “democratic” medium and much more geared to pushing the content of celebrities. With enough repeat tweeting it’s still usually possible to stir up a bit of interest but that feels pushy. I also know that I now miss a lot of content on Twitter in my own feed – people I know are very active but from whom I sometimes don’t see any posts for days and days. And I have set my TL to “new tweets first”. Sometimes I can see that my pieces have been posted by someone on Facebook and that always seems to give a real boost but I’m not on Facebook myself and am very reluctant to join. So how to promote blogs is also an issue.
Although it sometimes feels unrewarding, however, I’ve also often found that just one or two positive, or even critical, comments are enough to make me feel glad I posted something. I remember seeing a Philip Roth interview where he said that a writer only needs 5 or 6 readers. That was easy for him to say. I’d rather have the hundreds of thousands that he has/had and really wonder whether he’d have kept going with just a handful. But sometimes a compliment or a question can be enough to make it all worthwhile. I’ll try to remember that myself and try to finally get around to posting that piece about towns in Roman Britain that’s been on my mind the last few weeks. I also hope that you won’t be throwing in the towel. I can’t say that I read everything on your blog but I read enough of it – and enjoy what I do read – to hope that you keep posting.
Thanks, Chris. Yes, too much stuff (though surely that’s been true for decades, if not always), hence reliance on different sorts of filters and brands (established media outlets, famous names), hence – especially with the changes to Twitter, about which I feel the same as you – inexorable trend towards re-establishment of a very hierarchical media landscape, dominated by the great thoughts of established brands, bringing in enough fresh new voices to make us imagine that it is a meritocracy. It’s the sense that things could have been different (not necessarily that they were once different), that we could have had a flat, open internet, with search engines making it much easier to find interesting things within the ‘long tail’ rather than everything being driven towards the few big names. See e.g. the stuff Hossein Derakhshan was talking about some years ago: https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
If you’d like your old Twitter feed back, here are the instructions.
Thanks for this. I generally rely on Tweetdeck rather than Twitter, which – at least for the moment – is operating as it has in the past. But the thing is that I know what I’m looking for and how to find it, to a reasonable degree; it doesn’t help the problem that several people have commented on, that these algorithms are rendering everyone who isn’t already well known increasingly invisible unless you start playing the attention-seeking game.
I enjoy this blog but have missed a few posts because of “attention economy” issues. Right now Jonathan Sumption is giving a Reith Lecture from which I am picking up only, say, the odd reference to Madison because I plan to read the expanded version…
This put me in mind of TS Eliot’s remarks on the “dissociation of sensibility” in “The Metaphysical Poets,” but whether this is to any purpose I cannot just now say.
Whereas I heard five minutes of Sumption and started wondering about writing a cross blog post… Again, in an ideal world surely this is how it should work, rather than us plebs passively receiving the wisdom of the Great and Good and then waiting for other members of the G&G to tell us what to think about it…
At a “philosophical” level I’m not sure how to express my feelings on this. Talk of “the great and the good” obviously enlists sympathy, including from me; but recent travails within Labour have sensitized me to the extent to which literally fake news and utterly specious argument, combined with confirmation bias (and other factors) can devastate an important political institution and advance illiberalism. Sumption is at least intelligent and moderately scrupulous, qualities in increasingly short supply, at least in public life.
That’s an entirely fair point; yes, I’m being naive and idealistic in imagining a crowd of reasonable, open-minded bloggers and commentators engaging with the ideas in good faith, rather than the more likely cacophony of partisan point-scoring and excessive snark. Look at that, and you can see why newspapers started limiting their comment facilities (or authors just ignore them), and understand the temptation to limit interaction to more-or-less like-minded people where there’s the basis for a proper conversation. But the dangers of that are equally obvious. Maybe I caught Sumption’s lecture at the wrong moment, but the style was so much “this is what you should think because I say so” rather than “let’s think about this”, and so was crying out for critique and debate rather than passive acceptance.
In brief, yes, this is the basic dilemma for our time: how can we have a genuinely democratic discourse? Can this new technology enable that, without it instantly sliding into partisan noise and being subverted by malign forces?
I’ve had exactly the same experience wrt readership numbers – yes, I’ve got a few regular readers, so nothing I post is likely to go completely unseen, but for a post even to get into high double figures seems to require it to be ‘picked up’ by somebody whose profile gives them a guaranteed audience, on the Web or on Twitter. It seems that there isn’t a ‘word of mouth’ audience for blog posts any more; blog posts aren’t going to spark posts on other blogs, appear in ‘must read’ lists or even (mostly) generate comment threads. They just appear – and, unless they’ve been boosted by some ‘influencer’ or other, they don’t appear to very many people.
I can understand (although regret) that this is how things are; what I don’t understand is how the much ‘flatter’, more egalitarian landscape that we used to call the blogosphere turned into this, and not just over the last fifteen years but within the last two. (Where have those readers *gone*?)
It might also be worth mentioning that hobbyist blogs don’t seem to have suffered in quite the same way – I suppose if you’re into knitting or home brewing you aren’t going to be too fussed about whether Owen Jones (or Mary Beard) recommends a blog post or not.
It is just the last couple of years, isn’t it? I saw a steady rise in readers up to 2017, as I got into the swing of posting reasonably regularly and defined a style, hit a massive peak then largely but not entirely due to getting embroiled in the ‘were there black people in Roman Britain?’ controversy – then last year numbers dropped dramatically, by more than the numbers of readers for that one 2017 post that got mentioned by Beard, and this year has been substantially worse so far. As I said, this isn’t supposed to be a poor-me whining session; it’s just trying to confirm my impression that something has changed.
The decline began about the time I started following this blog. Not sure what to make of that.
My blogs have the same number of views as ever, but it’s a very small number. From the reader perspective, RSS collectors don’t seem to work as well as they used to, so Twitter fills that role for me now. It has a big drawback, though: I keep getting sucked into all kinds of other time-wasters so I might not be reading as much as in the past.
I’ve always tended to use Twitter, but my vague impression is that I see fewer links to blogs than I used to, and a lot more links to online articles. It’s also interesting – and I guess this now needs to be a sort of mea culpa – that my annual ‘blogs of the year’ list has included more online articles and hence fewer ‘proper’ blogs recently. Maybe I need to operate a much stricter policy.
I love hearing about your cats and your beer and sausage making and admire how you still contribute to social cohesion in the neighbourhood you live in and maintain a clear and articulate stance surrounded by a sea of Tory Brexiteers. But feel I cannot keep up with your intellectually. So I’m a very passive reader of your blog.
Interesting. I don’t think my numbers have taken a dive, but then they were always very pitiful (very, very, niche subjects) and would only spike around a post, which I rarely do.
I think we’re just experiencing a changing ecosystem, as you intuit, so many different media. I do feel blogs are the best, but still.
Numbers are way, way down, but even when it has been a while since I last posted, viewer numbers jump enormously when I do post — obviously some hard core readers are keeping me in their sights.
As a history blogger, my stats have always had a large component of readers finding me by googling some topic or person that has suddenly become of interest to someone who wasn’t around when I first posted. *That* number hasn’t changed much: it seems there is still a place for posts that sit out there waiting for someone to need them, even when regular readership declines. That keeps me posting, at least occasionally, and dreaming of getting back to it regularly. I suspect it will keep me renewing my hosting account for years, just so that my old posts are still available.
Yes; I occasionally wonder about saving the money, but then all this stuff would just be gone…
I picked up your observations via Twitter; I do think blogging is in the downward phase of it’s product life cycle and that’s mainly a human drive thing. Fashion, phases and fun etc. My own blog is an absurd stream of rants, observations and trivia, it’s flat lining but not dead yet. I notice a resurgence in podcast listeners, too busy or too lazy to read but able to listen at work or travelling. I think for any lengthy discourse on deeper topics that’s the way ahead … just like a radio station. Independent voices need to carry on in these dim-witted times.
Declining readership for and/or interest in blogs does seem to be a wider phenomenon, but to judge from comments here and on Twitter there’s no consensus about the causes; I’ve tended to assume, like you, that people are too busy or less inclined to read, but I’ve also seen it suggested that they now prefer to read proper books, and it may be that they’re still reading Internet stuff but it’s now more likely to be curated articles from recognised publications. Do we blame human attention span and desire for bright lights and novelty, or internet fatigue, or Twitter and Google algorithms..?
Some pro-blog observations: They are searchable and show up in Google searches. They have footnotes, hot links, and side panels that may supply more depth to the discussion. They may have good quality graphics. The blog content may not be dependent on the shaky financial footings of a particular social media platform; the blog content may survive much longer (depending on the survival of The Wayback Machine). They have all the advantages of reading: scanning, skimming, careful perusal of a section, quick internal cross-reference, etc. They may be read out loud by a device. Podcasts and Vlogs pale in comparison, if only because they take a seemingly interminable time in comparison to reading.
I was quick to Twitter, slow to Facebook, not yet at Instagram with all the cool kids. This is an existential worry; I remember back in the very early 80s being annoyed at having to learn Yet Another Editor when the first IBM PC appeared.
And there is the continuing embarrassment of riches for the devoted reader retired from exploration geology with non-trivial interests in the transmission of knowledge from the ancient world, colonization, etymology, genealogy, band music, theatre (both kinds), current events, botany, mycology, non-gaming technology, sailing, wildfires & weather, learning the context of almost anything, and different beers.
Yes, yes, yes and yes – especially the advantages for a reader, whereas I’ve been focusing mostly on the advantages for a writer.
Many thanks to everyone for your thoughts – it’s all too obviously ironic that a post on the decline of blogging attracts so many comments and so becomes the sort of interactive experience I imagined would always be the case when I started doing this… Spending all day in exam boards and meetings, so apologies if your comment gets stuck in moderation or ignored for a while.
I wonder to what extent changes in policy/algorithms by eg Facebook, primarily intended to limit the exposure gained by fake news, have affected blogs? There was eg an article about Facebook’s 2018 in, I think, Wired in the last couple of months, and no doubt other pieces.
Agreed. And I missed the opening of the lecture that annoyed you, tho I may sample it later. But the main thrust, so far as I could follow it while reading you, was the ultimate priority of democratic opinion over the expertise of elite lawyers. So the declarative opening may have been intended to forestall a misapprehension of his position as “populist.” Overall, I think it will all come out in the wash, tho this is mainly a matter of temperament)).
In the meantime… Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that blogs are on the way out, what is the new best way of trying to take would-be accessible academic waffling to a wider audience? Vlogs? Podcasts? Some technology I’ve never heard of? Advantages and disadvantages? And does this all depend on what audience one is attempting to reach?
My impression is Vlogs are getting *really* big, above all interviews. You could do one with every visiting speaker you get. Indeed, you may be uploading their talks to YouTube already. You could forewarn them of things on your mind, and then take as long as you like. Good-enough equipment is affordable, and a degree of lo-fi doesn’t seem to be an issue. Or I’m sure your department could stretch to it….
No decline to speak of on my (admittedly rather young) blog – in fact quite the opposite. But it would be sad if the trend is indeed for (certain) blogs to attract fewer views. I’ve been frankly stunned by the amount of viewers mine has attracted so far and haven’t yet lost hope that blogs can continue to perform an important function in creating space for better quality public discussion.
I noticed two inflection points: 2013 when forums and mailing lists seriously declined and I launched my blog, and 2016 when growth declined from ~50-100%/year to c. 10-20%/year and stayed there. But in any other context 10-20% annual growth is amazing, and the second inflection may be related to politics in the US and UK.
Compare the viewership statistics on ancient.eu’s About page https://www.ancient.eu/static/about/ where growth also slowed down after 2016.
To mutilate Plutarch, leaving would make my small corner of the Internet even smaller, so I don’t plan to change any time soon.