I’ve noticed a long-range trend in my blog statistics which I think is worth noticing. There’s been a gradual downward trend in the number of readers, which seems to parallel the rise of Twitter. If I’m not writing and commenting on Twitter or Facebook, the number of readers here declines pretty rapidly according to the rules of Zeno’s Paradox — a 50% drop in the number of viewers today, a 50% drop tomorrow, and so on.
Have other bloggers noticed a similar trend? Do you find that people are bothering to read your blog posts? Or is blogging dead or dying, as the New York Times suggested?
Do your blog stats count feed subscriptions?
They do, but separately for each post. It’s complicated. I have to delve pretty deeply into the stats to figure out what’s going on. I’d have to say, a lot more people are reading posts in a disaggregated way. They’re not coming to the page to read the last three or four entries on the page, or coming every day… they’re reading stories where they’ve found links from Twitter, or they’re reading from aggregators like Google Reader. Which is fine, but it means that my individual stories have to be more potent, and I have to be more compelling with my titles and excerpts. And I probably need to write shorter blog entries.
Paul Krugman apparently limits himself to an 8,000 character count for his columns, including spaces. And he thinks that 800 words is about the maximum number that people will read. So I probably have to start thinking more along those lines.
I don’t think blogging is dead, but I do think we are overwhelmed with access. I know my RSS feeds fill up faster than I can keep up with them. As a result, I tend to read blogs more sporadically than I’d like. For me, it’s often difficult to make blog reading as much of a priority as I’d like because other projects require my attention. If blogging is dying it’s due, in part, to its success, its ubiquity.