Perhaps yes. We are not sure if we can give you an accurate answer to this question as there is a paucity of verified up-to-date data on blogs, bloggers and blogging. A figure predicted by Statista (an online portal for statistics) suggests, in the United States, 31.7 million bloggers will be active in 2020, posting at least once a month. No one seems to know to what extent we can expect this figure to increase year-by-year as an indication of the growth of the blogosphere. What we do know is that, as new blog pages are starting every day, many are being discontinued.
There doesn’t seem to be a worldwide statistics on the number of blogs or bloggers. But Kyle Byers of GrowthBadger, a content marketing site in the USA, states “There are over 600 million blogs in the world today, out of over 1.7 billion websites,” without quoting his source. Of the major blogging platforms, neither Blogger (owned by Google) nor Medium (started in 2012 by Evan Williams of Twitter), among others, disclose blog or user statistics publicly. So, it’s difficult to estimate the size of the industry.
WordPress, the most popular blogging platform today, owned by Automattic, which acquired Tumblr (a microblogging site) six months ago from Verizon, shares the following data on its website:
- Over 409 million people view (i.e. read) more than 20 billion pages each month on WordPress sites;
- WordPress users produce about 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month;
- WordPress blogs are written in over 120 languages, including English (71%), Spanish (4.7%), Indonesian (2.4%), Portuguese (Brazil 2.3%), among others.
The strength of this data suggests that today, blogs still enjoy both publishing and readership.
Blogging became mainstream communication when brands and businesses realized the power of blogs in reaching large audiences without the heavy expenditure of advertising in traditional print media. They set up their own blogs or outsourced it to bloggers, in sync with their overall social media strategies and plans. It is effortless for brands and businesses to share a link from their blog post on their social media channels to help flourish their online presence. They can now reach out to and engage with their consumers or clients, promote their ads and other messages through digital marketing, and collect subjective and qualitative feedback through comments on blog posts.
Since blogging hit mainstream around 2005, it has grown to become a productive marketing-communication channel. Because most blogs use long-form text-based copy, it is particularly effective in communicating details: e.g. product and service features, reviews of books and films, explain political stance and opinions, business and thought leadership, customer philosophy and relationships, break down complex subjects such as scientific discoveries and phenomena. Besides, with Search Engine Optimisation, blogs are a big help in a brand’s or business’s online search ranking.
However, times are changing. The younger generation has shorter attention spans. They are averse to reading long copies, prefer shorter, more exciting advertising and marketing messages, and like to be engaged with brands and businesses which use colorful visual stimulus. Photos and videos are a great attraction for them. Owing to the above marketers are integrating the traditional blogging style with the trendy tactics such as the implementation of videos, v-logs, etc. Similar to any other aspect of marketing, blog marketing also keeps updating to match with changing consumer trends and the chances of it being obsolete are slim!