Five years is eons in Internet (
) time, and a lot has changed in the blogosphere since 2005. Sites have been born, sites have died, sites have grown up and others have faded away. Entirely new blogging formats have been created and business empires have been built on the foundations of humble blog beginnings.
Today’s blogosphere is larger and more diverse than it was five years ago, and yet only a few blogs — the so-called “A-listers” — have risen to a place of dominance in the new media landscape. The blogosphere of 2010 is also powered in many ways by social media, something that barely existed five years ago, and was likely an afterthought to most hobbyist bloggers of the day.
How did we get from there to here? What follows is a look back at the last five years in the blogosphere.
Then and Now
In July 2005, by penning his first post on this site, Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore was joining a blogging movement that had already swelled to over 14 million blogs, and was growing at a rate of 80,000 per day. Yet, while most of those bloggers were of the journaling variety, Mashable (
) was entering an evolving blogosphere. While 2005 was not the first year in which any one person made a living at blogging, it does mark a number of important milestones in the transition of the blogosphere as a place of primarily random thoughts and banalities to one that now supports a growing number of burgeoning media empires.
Blogging has entered the mainstream consciousness as a legitimate source of media, likely due to the sheer number of blogs on the Internet today (133 million and counting), even though the vast majority of blogs are still likely personal. According to the 2009 State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati, professional bloggers are blogging more than ever, while hobbyists are blogging less. One reason for that, as we’ll explore, might be the rise of social media.
Blogging as a Business
In February of 2005, blogger Jason Kottke decided to quit his job and move from a hobbyist to a full-time blogger. Though his experiment ultimately failed, Kottke’s bold move was in many ways indicative of a emerging blogging mentality that was to become more common over the next five years: Treating the blog as a startup enterprise.
Though large blogs like Boing Boing and DailyKos were already gaining influence compared to their mainstream media counterparts, three events in particular in 2005 helped legitimize blogs as viable business endeavors. First, Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post with a $2.5 million seed investment. Since then, the site has become the most popular blog on the Internet and a leading voice in American politics, with millions of contributors, both paid and unpaid. Furthermore, it has taken in about $37 million in venture capital funding. Of course, The Huffington Post’s rise to the top was not instant, but the site’s story is one that has affirmed the blog’s rightful place in the media business pantheon.
The second major event of 2005 was AOL’s purchase of Weblogs, Inc., the parent company of popular blogs like Engadget and Autoblog, for a reported $25 million. The successful exit of that major blogging property — one of only a handful of such blog networks in existence at the time — encouraged the development of the network model, in which multiple blogs are launched in tandem and link to one another for SEO reasons. Three years later, many of the Weblogs, Inc. blogs had seen triple- or quadruple-digit visitor growth, and the company had moved from paying a group of freelance writers on a per post and traffic basis, to hiring a growing number of full-time writers.
The most important occurrence for blogging in 2005, however, might have been the launch of Federated Media. Backed by The New York Times, Omidyar Network and a handful of angel investors, FM was one of the first major advertising firms to focus on blog properties, and that made it a lot easier for fledgling blog startups to grow into the major media brands that many of them have become.
Given the injection of cash from ad agencies like Federated Media, bloggers were able to spend more time producing content and had the capital to hire help. It was that simple combination of cash and time that caused the blogging model to ultimately be so successful, according to Steve Spalding, a Digital Business Strategist and Founder of the blog How To Split An Atom.
“As [blogs] kept making more content, they kept appearing in Google (
) and kept getting linked to by bigger and better sites, which lead to more traffic, more relevance, more links and most importantly, more money,” he said. “Eventually you hit the tipping point where traffic, cash and relevancy make you skyrocket above the competition, which is where many of the big blogs find themselves today.”
Fast forward five years, and the Spalding equation (time + money + content) has worked its magic across the blogosphere. According to Technorati, 28% of bloggers reported earning some sort of income from blogging in 2009, and of those, the mean annual ad revenue for bloggers is over $42,000 — a healthy income in many parts of the world.
Disclosure: Mashable works with Federated Media.
The Rise of Social Media
Perhaps the biggest shift in blogging culture over the past half decade has been the rise of social media. One of the most visible ways in which social media has affected blogging is that it changed the type of content that dominates the blogosphere. According to Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com and author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming, and Why it Matters, social media provided a new home for a lot of minutiae around the blogosphere — status updates, shared links, passing observations — and freed up blogs for longer form, more valuable writing.
“In [the early] days it was common to hear the complaint from old media curmudgeons that blogs were worthless because, you know, who wants to know what you had for lunch?” said Rosenberg. “So today those messages are all on Facebook (
) or Twitter (
), the curmudgeons get to toss their complaints at shiny new targets — and blogging, miraculously, has become the center of gravity for in-depth, substantial dialogue and inquiry online.”
Said Rosenberg, the rise of social media has birthed a blogosphere with more high-quality and thoughtful content. Social media hasn’t killed blogging, or replaced it, he said, but social networks have “deepened it, given it more clarity and heft.”
For Spalding, social media has created a more dynamic atmosphere, one brimming with new opportunities for networking and fodder for posts. “[Social media] hasn’t changed my world but it has expanded it in ways that are difficult to talk about unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches with it,” he said.
Of course, for blogs, traffic equals money, so the most important change brought about by social media over the past five years may have been that social networks are increasingly a source of high quality traffic. According to a report from earlier this year via web measurement firm Hitwise, Facebook is now sending more traffic to news sites than mainstream aggregators like Google News. Twitter is also starting to move up the referrer ranks for news and media sites, said Hitwise.
While only a handful of blogs qualify for inclusion in the “news and media” category at that firm, it’s probably safe to assume that social media sources are becoming more and more important traffic generators for the generally very web savvy blogosphere. In fact, Hitwise reported last year that Facebook had become the top traffic referrer for the popular entertainment blog Perez Hilton. (There isn’t much more hard data to back that, however, beyond what I can deduce from the referrer logs of Mashable itself.)
When news of Facebook’s rise as a legitimate source of referral traffic spread across the web, noted blogger and PR veteran Steve Rubel commented on his blog, “If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade.” That’s even more true for bloggers if we replace “Google” with “search,” and “Facebook” with “social media.” Where getting visitors to your website over the past decade was often focused around search engine optimization, attention has shifted in the last five years to social media and the ever-expanding myriad of options and niche sites therein. SEO is still important, of course, but it is now a much smaller piece of a more complicated puzzle.
Blogging Infiltrates News Media
“[Blogs] are an essential part of the news landscape, and they have gained more credibility — mostly because there’s less knee-jerk anti-blog reaction today,” said Rosenberg in an e-mail interview. “We now have serious and respected news providers and cultural agenda-setters that started out as independent blogs (like Talking Points Memo and Boing Boing). We also have blogs that are manned by employees of major old-fashioned media organizations.”
In December of 2009, Mashable’s Community Manager (and then freelance contributor) Vadim Lavrusik wrote that the future journalist will — out of necessity — borrow many of the tools and techniques cultivated by bloggers over the past decade. “To be a social journalist and one that engages in online communities, journalists will have to practice blogging regularly and serve as curators of other content on the web,” he wrote. “Journalists of tomorrow will be participating in the link economy by gathering, synthesizing and making sense of other content across the web.”
The “link economy,” in which authors link to one another to add context and provide readers with different viewpoints, has long been the domain of bloggers. Of course, one oft-hurled criticism is that bloggers don’t add original reporting, they just link to it and comment on it. While that may be part of what many bloggers do, and while that may have been partly (but not completely) true five years ago, it certainly isn’t the whole story today. Most of the major blogs that were founded in the past 5 to 10 years offer a mix of their own reporting, curation of reporting from the around the web, and commentary.
The debate about whether bloggers are journalists has even reached the upper echelons of government. In 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill that would extend traditional media shield protections offered to journalists to bloggers. That, for many, was a clear message that blogging as a medium had become a vital part of the news media landscape. And indeed, in the intervening years, blogging has been instrumental in documenting human rights abuses, has been cited for prestigious awards and has outranked the mainstream press in search listings.
Over the past five years, mainstream journalists are finally starting to accept that curation of news is a legitimate journalistic pursuit. When the political blog Talking Points Memo broke the U.S. attorney scandal in 2007, it was their ability to bring together information from other reporters and synthesize and clarify that information for readers that made them such a leading voice on the story. “[Talking Points Memo founder Matt] Marshall and his staff broke quite a few ’scoops’ in their months-long investigation into the firings,” wrote Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review. “But they shed much light on the emerging scandal by stitching together reporting from local journalists as well. TPM Media reporters gathered information by working phones, swapping e-mails, and searching documents, as well as following reporting from San Diego’s Union-Tribune and North County Times, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and McClatchy’s Washington bureau covering the firings of respected local U.S. Attorneys and their replacement with Bush administration loyalists.”
According to Niles, current American media newsrooms are isolated and rarely rely on reporting from competing news outlets. Blogs, on the other hand, practice the increasingly more accepted art of curation, allowing them to “reveal a more complete and accurate truth for their readers.”
Perhaps even more elucidating, as Rosenberg noted, almost every major traditional media outlet has added blogging over the past five years to their stable of distribution channels (to be precise, 48.55% of media outlets now have blogs; that number is likely higher among the major, national outlets, though). From the New York Times to CNN, from the Wall Street Journal to The Guardian, blogs are now an important and prominently displayed way to deliver the news. And the number of journalists blogging is expected to increase.
The Changing Landscape of Blog Software
One other major event would reshape the blog world in 2005: The launch of WordPress.com. The free, hosted blogging service gave anyone access to a full WordPress (
) installation, something that previously required some technical expertise (though a few web hosts were already offering their own hosted solutions). It can’t be understated the dramatic effect that WordPress.com has had on blogging. Along with the self-hosted version of the software, WordPress accounts for some 25 million blogs, of which over 11 million are hosted on WordPress.com and serve over 2 billion pageviews each month.
Statistics aside, what WordPress really offered to users was a marriage of ease of use with power. WordPress is a powerful software package — one that many websites use in lieu of a full content management system — and WordPress.com brought that power to the masses in an easy to use package. WordPress.com has been a major component of the growth of the blogosphere over the past five years.
Yet, WordPress’ rise isn’t the only major story in the world of blog software over the last half decade. The other is the advent of tumblelogs. Tumblelogs are stream of consciousness weblogs that have distinct ways of displaying different types of content — text, quotes, videos, photos, links, etc. Though only recently have news outlets begun experimenting with them for serious blogging, tumblelogs have become extremely popular due to their ease of use.
Tumblr (
), the most popular tumblelog hosting service, has seen extremely impressive growth since launching in 2007 and now serves over 1 billion pageviews per month, making it about half the size of WordPress.com. In other words, tumblelogs have been firmly embraced by mainstream users as a legitimate form of blogging.
The interoperability of tools has also made the technical bits of blogging easier, said Spalding. Five or six years ago, for example, it wasn’t very easy to find a video and insert it into a post, but now you can locate a video in seconds on YouTube (
) and embed it by copying and pasting a few lines of text. Those improving tools, like WordPress.com, Tumblr and YouTube embeds, are what have caused the wild growth in the blogosphere over the second half of the the last decade. “Blogging tools have made it easier for people to focus on content production rather than the often tedious process of content formatting. If anything is responsible for the popularity of blogging the steady improvement of the tools over the years has to be it,” Spalding said.
What’s Next?
Blogging has come a long way since 2005. From a rather unorganized collection of mostly personal diarists, to a major voice in the news media landscape, blogging is clearly one of the stars of today’s Internet. “These days almost everyone is a ‘blogger’ and the delineation between someone who gets 5 visitors a year and 50,000 visitors an hour is a little blurry,” said Spalding. “I think that’s a good thing because, the faster we walk away from the label ‘blogger,’ the faster we can get down to the real business of producing valuable content for the people who are looking to read it.”
The community of those who call themselves “bloggers” has grown to the point where generalizations no longer work. When everyone is a blogger, a blogger can be many different things. “There are so many different [blogging communities],” said Rosenberg. “There’s the political blogosphere with its various partisan subsections, the tech blogosphere (with subdivisions for developers and startup people and VCs and social media folks and more), the world of BlogHer, the crafts people, the culture bloggers, the cool gang in Tumblr-land, the science bloggers and law bloggers and librarians and on and on. As blogging went mainstream, it came to reflect the diversity of the human population, not perfectly of course, but widely enough to warn us all off from making broad statements about its attitude or makeup.”
That splintering of the blogosphere is likely to continue into the next decade. The big blogs will continue to grow and become more ingrained in the media landscape, while niche communities of bloggers will further codify. The blogosphere will, as Rosenberg said, continue to reflect humankind’s diversity.
Specifically, though, blogs will probably evolve over the next five years in ways we can’t yet fathom. “These days, I just enjoy the ride,” Spalding told us. That’s good advice.
