This is sort of a response to a recent post over at A Modern Mother called The Sate of British Mummy Blogging 2009 and predictions for 2010. It shouldn’t be interpreted as an attack however. Just an alternative point of view. And I promise I’m not sulking just because she said “Mummy and not “Parent”. This also isn’t a judgment about how anyone else chooses to write their blog.
Despite that caveat however I suspect that I’m still going to get jumped on and shouted at, but here goes:
There is currently a lot of hype in the UK parent blogger scene surrounding the growing influence and power of bloggers. People are pointing to the vultures circling print media and citing it as evidence that blogging will lead the way in the new world order. That blogs will become as widely read as newspapers and will be the new source of information in the internet age.
Which lets face it, is bollocks.
Ultimately blog audiences are very small. I, for example, am currently placed at number ten on the Tots 100 index, so theoretically I am the tenth most read and influential UK parent blogger. Last month I was even at number 4. Yet according to my statcounter the average number of unique hits I get a day is 88. Feedburner says that I have just over 200 subscribers. These aren’t statistics that are going to have The Sunday Times quivering in its boots.
Blogging is dying if anything. Maybe not the UK parenting blogs, but certainly in general. Twitter has killed, or at least seriously injured, a number of great blogs, from Raging Dad to Mere Bagatell, and I’m sure it will kill many more. And when people get bored of twitter, they will move onto the next thing – just like they have left blogging.
I may well be one of them. I may well abandon this blog and become a hardcore user of Flingding, or Beepaboop, or whatever social media trend is round the next corner. Don’t get me wrong, I love blogging and for the moment I’m happy enough pottering about in the blogosphere, blathering away about whatever happens to catch my fancy. The world of blogging is still very exciting to me, and still has a multitude of wonderful possibilities (take my brand new blog Lee and Dan’s Midnight Movie Club for example. *plug plug*). But I’m not naive enough to think I’ll still be doing this thirty years from now – I’ll be far too busy playing on my hover-board and eating my dinner in tablet form for that sort of stuff.
I can’t help feeling that all this hype is just an enormous artificially inflated bubble. That the reality is that the only people reading blogs are the other bloggers. There may be over 800 members of the British Mummy Bloggers Network, and those bloggers may all have 200 subscribers each. But that does not translate into 160,000 readers because all of these people are simply reading each other. Lets face it, Bloggers aren’t going to be impressed by your positive review of the new clothing range at NEXT, because just last week they got offered the same £25 voucher to review it too.
Just as a way of an experiment, if you are reading this and don’t have a blog of your own raise your hand to be counted in the comments section. I will be very interested to see the ratio of non-bloggers reading this, but I suspect it will be under 20%.
As you may know, this spring Think Parents gave me a blu-ray player and a bunch of Disney disks to review. And every month or so they send a few more for me to take a look at. There is no way on earth that my reviews have made Disney back the money they have spent on me. No possible way. Even Dad Who Writes’ excellent UNISON metaphor post doesn’t convince me (as a quick aside: that UNISON post is also very relevant to an discussion Tysdaddy and I were having over on his blog. I’ve said it before, but I nominate Dad Who Writes for International President of the Internet)
So my prediction for 2009 is that this whole PR explosion and blogging hype is going to die a death, and the medium will return to the grass roots sub-culture from which it emerged (albeit with significantly increased numbers). Companies will realize that they could reach an equivalently sized audience if they set up a small stall outside the Packhorse shopping centre in Huddersfield, and then begin to wonder why they are bothering. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing, and I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. And I know I’m certainly going to take advantage of it while it’s still here. I’ve abused my position on the Tot’s 100 to pries £190 out of PRs in aid of The Joseph Salmon Trust this month alone, and what’s more have managed to maintain a feeling of integrity – hurrah!
But this blogging is bigger than jesus thing is a bubble; and bubbles tend to burst.
