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An Alternative State of British Parent Blogging 2009

Dec 12th, 2009
by Dan.
89 comments

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.

Blogging for Fun and Profit?

Oct 26th, 2009
by Dan.
96 comments

Something that Sally from Who’s the Mummy said in a recent post has got me thinking:

…many of the parent bloggers I speak to are desperate to make some money from their blogs. As one blogger told me last week: “I’m just so sick of working for free.”

Now I recognize that I’m as much of a corporate whore as the next man (free blu-ray player and trip to London anyone). But seriously? Complaining that blogging without being paid is “working for free”? Do you charge for taking family photos too? Demand money for doing your garden or reading a book?

I’m being unfair. I don’t actually know the context of that particular conversation and so shouldn’t really comment. But it does raise a wider issue – the increasing commercialism of parent blogging.

Its pretty widely accepted that UK parent blogging today is probably at around the same point that US Mommy and Daddy blogging was three or four years ago. When I first started All That Comes With It people like Clare’s Dad and Idaho Dad were able to list just about every Daddyblogger in the world on their blogroll. Sure, it was a long list, but it was doable. What’s more, If you go back two or three years again you could do the same with Mommy bloggers as well. These days however US parent blogs of both genders number in their tens of thousands.

Here in the UK parent blogging is now slowly gathering up more steam. Mummy blogs are popping up everywhere, becoming so numerous that you couldn’t follow them all even if you wanted to. Daddy Blogs are less common, but new ones are slowly starting to appear here and there and the momentum is growing.

However there is a fly in the ointment. Currently it seems that every second blog that is starting up is doing so with a hearty scream of “SHOW ME THE MONEY!!”. The ethos of blogging appears to be moving from the ‘zine mentality of the 70′s into the greed is good mentality of the 80′s. We’re sliding from do-it-yourself punk into slick and commercially driven new romanticism.

But I don’t want to be a new romantic damnit. I don’t suit the makeup.

This could all be sour grapes. I could be taking this attitude because other people seems to get more PR pitches and free stuff than I do. I could well be sticking out my bottom lip and proclaiming “I don’t want to play your stupid game anyway”. But still, I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the compromises I’ve already made on this blog to commercialism (the blu-ray reviews, the advert I filmed for Disney, the walking sock contest I recently held).

In my day job we frequently get visits from pharmaceutical reps. Ostensibly these visits are to inform us of latest research on their products and discuss medication side effects and treatment strategies. But in reality the research they present has been so heavily spun it can’t be trusted, therefore any claims that rep visits are updating our professional knowledge is completely laughable.

So why are the reps let in the door? Because they bring lunch that’s why. Bribery, pure and simple. They bring cakes and flapjacks and buns; crisps and sandwiches and fruit. All paid for indirectly by the taxpayer through charging the NHS inflated pharmaceutical prices.

And that’s just the nurses. The doctors get free holidays and weekends away out of the fuckers.

I made a decision a few years ago never to accept anything from a pharmaceutical rep. So while my colleagues are munching on chocolate eclairs and pringles I sit self righteously in a corner, pointedly not eating anything and smugly reveling in my highly evolved sense of ethics.

Of course none of my colleagues notice my silent protests. And even if they do they often mistake the smug look on my face for an expression of gastric discomfort and assume I’m not eating because I’ve got trapped wind. But still, it helps me sleep at night and that’s the main thing.

My current dilemma is that I’m unsure if I should extend my “no cake” policy to blogging. The reason I blog is to document my family life and connect with friends. Bringing commercial aspects into that seems to sully it a little. I feel tainted somehow, like I’m exploiting my family and my friends in order to get free stuff.

On the other hand I have developed a pretty strong editorial process. Every blu-ray review I’ve done has been completely honest and I’ve turned down a few very tempting freebies because I felt them to be incongruous to the blog. But I still feel uncomfortable. Like I’m teetering on the edge of a slippery slope

Then again, I seem to be uncomfortable with everything at the moment, as evidenced by my propensity for “thinking aloud” posts recently. My mojo is back, but it seems to have brought a tendency for rambling and wordy introspection with it.

I must make it clear that I’m not judging others for taking up these freebies and PR offers. In particular some of my best blogging buddies are in that grey hinterland between pro and hobby blogging, and so their relationships with companies and professional media types are wholly appropriate and I would not criticize them for them .

But I don’t want to be a journalist or a copywriter. I thought I did in my early twenties, even getting myself the ubiquitous media studies degree. But then I quickly realized that life wasn’t for me and chose to be a nurse instead.

So now according to Erin I have to come up with my traditional poignant open-ended morality statement. I think the best way to describe my dilemma is that I’ve always viewed blogging as an extension of my home life rather than my work life, and the potential to get material gain from writing here has muddied the water for me somewhat. My fear is that by treating All That Comes With It as a commodity rather than an artistic expression (*snort*) I’ll spoil it for myself somehow. But the lure of cool free stuff can often seem very tempting.

So far I think I’ve struck the right balance, but I need to be mindful that my greed doesn’t tip my own self imposed see-saw of integrity.

How about you, what are your thoughts?