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Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

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Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#41
I have a blog I posted fairly consistently to for 2 1/2 years. I just checked the stats and in that time I have had a total of 1,530 hits. Total. And for my efforts I have earned $2.35. The reason I abandoned my blog is very simple. It never got any traction and I have bills to pay. Perhaps when I get a decent exit I'll give it another try but until then, I have bigger priorities.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#44

95% of just about everything people try out gets abandoned - relationships, hobbies, jobs. We all have a limited capacity for what we can spend time on in our lives. The only difference with blogs is that (at least for the free ones like blogger/tumblr/posterous), there's no incentive to take them down and they don't decay / disappear on their own. It's like wondering why 95% of dates don't lead to marriage.

Exactly. Imagine for a moment how many novels started were never finished. How many brushes were left to collect dust after a few paintings. Or ab-rollers that never produced any six-pack abs. Or gardens abandoned after a couple salads.

The more amazing number here, in my opinion, is that 5% of blogs stick around. That seems incredibly high for a broadly popular pursuit. Even a 1% follow-through would strike me as a far better success rate than most common human endeavors.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#46

Very spot-on description of the mania-to-blah mindset that does in 95% of blogs. I'd also add to the mix: 1) Unrealistic Expectations. Most people have no idea what "success" really looks like for a blog. They assume that, if six months have gone by and they're not getting 100,000+ followers, they've failed. Another unrealistic expectation is what I'd call an overly generous self-assessment: the blogger in question o…

I disagree with the 90% / 10% thing.

I was a very active blogger in my native language at some point, but I had only like 50 subscribers and maybe 300 page views in a good week.

I then switched to English and wrote only a dozen of articles or so. One of them was hard to write, basically a HOW-TO article who's implementation I had to write and test before I wrote the article. I also work full-time for a living and it took 3 days to write that article (a really long time for most bloggers).

Enough to say that a single well-researched article was more valuable, bringing in more subscribers than my previous shitty blog on which I talked about shitty things in a fire-and-forget style. And this was also kind of depressing, as if you want to be a successful blogger, you need hundreds of these good articles that take a lot of effort to write.

The way I see it - it's the same as with software development - 80% development / 80% polishing / 80% marketing.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#48
post #22

I like this idea, I've had a thing or two I wanted to write on, but didn't want to setup a blog. I've actually thought of building something similar myself. So, excited about this website, I clicked on "Write a post". Oh, you want to tie to my twitter account. Nevermind.

Why not connect your Twitter account? We won't post anything on your behalf...perhaps we should have made that clearer :/
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