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Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

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Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#71

Post by postit »

I can share my experience on why I stopped having an RSS reader and keeping track of blogs, it kind of summarizes also some opinions from old avid readers I know.

TLTR: Lack of good content, and amazing alternatives.

- Huge backlog: I used to track 2k+ blogs on Bloglines/Google Reader, it was nearly impossible to read everything, but the collective mind of the internet made easy to keep track of what my close friends were reading using delicious and I could easily keep up with good content.

- Lack of good content: Once delicious was losing interest, I started to rely on Twitter to find good content, again unsuccessful. Thanks, today we have Reddit/HN to filter this, but getting a click from HN won't make me "subscribe."

- Good alternatives for tech content. Today most conferences dump their entire collection on YT; I'd rather watch a 45mn lecture on 2X on youtube or listen to an excellent podcast than read a long blog post.

- Audibooks =)

In the long run, it's almost impossible for individual text blogs to compete with such social validated content and curated content.

edit: typos and grammar

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#72

Post by Udo »

I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen.

Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become harder. The collapse of Google Reader, followed by the rise of Youtube and social media has caused this. You just don't build an audience for a blog anymore. You build an audience for your social media channels instead, and your blog becomes part of the content you share. It's now a delivery platform only.

So the question becomes instead how to a) attract social subscribers and b) get your content shared. Your content needs to cut through a lot of noise to get noticed. With very few exceptions I would say the answers for most blogs would be

1) produce content regularly, like clockwork

2) specialize into something unique to attract core followers first, you can always broaden later

3) compete with the big guys either in quality or in click-bait generation

I wouldn't branch too far out as far as cross-posting to different social networks is concerned. Identify 1-3 platforms and really engage people on those. Don't just spew links into the void.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#73

Post by caminante »

wodenokoto wrote: post #44
parhurs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading these comments makes me think of a crazy conspiracy theory: Google killed Reader to promote search.

The common theory is they did it to boosts Google plus. They wanted you to follow blogs interest on G+ rather than more directly via Reader/RSS.

The driver was financial. Google cited (03/2013) a user decline [0]. You don't need a conspiracy or more reasons to shutter the service.

> "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined."

[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-c...

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#74

Post by vpslab_sk »

personlurking wrote: post #62
vpslab_sk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, OT, I'm unable to edit my comment so sorry for the typos, my spell-checker was apparently on holiday. Now, to address your reply, people _are_ opinion-forming beings, its our human nature. We do have opinions even if we try to convince our-selves we don't. Writing a blog without exposing your opinion just so you won't offend anyone is an intellectual humanity-denying crime. Its a form of self-castration in my…

Well, I did write 'editorialized', meaning they aren't 'dry, soul-less pieces of wikipedia-like information'.

Well, no reason to take my comment personally, I don't know your work. I was merely taking advantage of your reply to take a punch at the current wave of political correctness and a special form of auto-censorship disguised as politeness, that's crawling into the blogosphere like a drunken monkey into a liquor factory.. + this sub-thread is OT anyway

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#75

Post by inputcoffee »

Udo wrote: post #72

I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen. Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become hard…

10! Years!

You kept it going for so long and shut it down.

I guess you grew the blog in a different era (internet time). Can you give more info on how many people you had and how it tapered off?

If you wanted engagement, can you have added engagement features? (Q&A section, call to action to ask questions, announcements of open chats etc)

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#76

Post by Mahn »

jo909 wrote: post #26

I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

I think it's something to do with the rate at which content is being created today. Ten years ago following 10 blogs that interested you was a no brainer, but there's just so much today that it's hard to follow anything in particular when you are interested in everything. Heck, even sticking to aggregators only like HN and Reddit I'm still saving a lot more links to read later than I'm actually reading.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#77

Post by AndrewStephens »

I've blogged (https://sheep.horse/) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt:

* Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing.

* I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site because they sat unused. The only posts that go viral are the short, simple posts with inflammatory headlines. I don't want to go down that route.

* Occasionally a post will be linked on Reddit or Hacker News. Then the post will get thousands of hits but this tails off quickly. After a couple of days the traffic will go back to normal - I see almost no retention. It is actually quite hard to predict what will be take off and my attempts to promote my work to these sites myself have been completely unsuccessful.

* The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff)

Blogging (and running a website in general) is not popular these days because so much of the oxygen is taken up by social media or sites like Reddit where people can make their points easily in a controlled environment. Time has moved on and unless Facebook collapses I don't see blogging coming back in a big way.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#78

Post by Udo »

inputcoffee wrote: post #75
Udo wrote: post #72

I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen. Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become hard…

10! Years! You kept it going for so long and shut it down. I guess you grew the blog in a different era (internet time). Can you give more info on how many people you had and how it tapered off? If you wanted engagement, can you have added engagement features? (Q&A section, call to action to ask questions, announcements of open chats etc)

> You kept it going for so long and shut it down.

Sometimes it's just time to move on. In the early days things were different, everybody had a blog, and you had no trouble making mutual connections. I met interesting people, had interesting discussions, sometimes you'd meet fellow bloggers at events and find out you're subscribed to each other. One time, I spent a week of my holidays at a famous tech blogger's house, on a whim, even though I had never met the guy before.

People moved on to other platforms, but I never built a social presence, nor did I do anything to really grow my audience.

> Can you give more info on how many people you had and how it tapered off?

Traffic wasn't that great by modern standards. According to Google Analytics, a good post would generate maybe 10-20k within the first month, and then taper off sharply. A bad post would not generate more than a few hundred eyeballs. My stuff was never monetized, so I didn't track visitors that well. Sometimes I saw there had been a crazy spike like months ago ;)

> If you wanted engagement, can you have added engagement features?

It's a matter of commitment. If I ever start anything again, that would definitely be a focus.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#79

Post by borplk »

KCFforecast wrote: post #38

I have just posted a long post that probably will be located near the bottom because is lengthy. So here is a short one with my 2 cents: 1) I like to read quality post, I think quality is the main source to sustain a post. 2) Don't shallow your post if you want to have an open road for future success. 3) Your post is a drop in an ocean of knowledge in which content is interrelated. Perhaps you can be successful posti…

I downvoted that post not because of length but because it genuinely looked like it's auto-generated by a spam/content summary bot.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#80

Post by dorfsmay »

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself why you blog?

For me it is to make the information available, mainly for me, and hoping it can help somebody else out there.

Interestingly, my blog is dead right now for technical reasons, I was looking on how to do something specific a few weeks ago, something that I hag blogged about. Google wasn't helping (my blog has been down long enough that it's no longer in google cache), so I ended up going to archive.org looking for my old blog and found what I needed right away!

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