
Why are 95% of blogs abandoned? - mol2103
http://postary.com/twitter/mileslennon/why-are-95-of-blogs-abandoned
======
tomkarlo
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.

~~~
roc
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.

------
jonnathanson
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 overestimates how much gas he has in the tank on a particular
topic. He may get a few great ideas in his head one day, then build a blog
around them, then find himself struggling for material on the third day.

2) Lack of Patience. Building a successful following is rarely an overnight
journey. Some blogs take years to find their footing, and years more to find
their audiences.

3) Insufficient or Non-Strategic Marketing. As folks in the startup world are
well aware, you really need to think outside the box -- and occasionally go
totally wild -- to get attention in today's crowded marketplace of ideas.
You've also got to be clever about building credibility, connections to the
right influencers, and paths outward from those influencers to broader
audiences. By contrast, most hobby-bloggers take a "write it and they will
come" approach -- hoping naively that people will flock to their blogs as if
called to them by magic. Or they'll blast notices out to all their friends and
family, rather than taking a careful inventory of who might actually be
interested, who might be _very_ interested, and who might be so interested
that she'll tell her friends (or, conversely, who might not give a flying you-
know-what). It's counterintuitive to think that starting out by telling fewer
people is preferable to shotgunning everyone you know. But the shotgun
approach seldom works. Start surgically.

As it turns out, probably 90% of the work of building a successful blog takes
place _outside_ of the blog. Writing great content is the easy part (and it's
not easy!); getting folks to notice is the hard part.

~~~
bad_user
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.

~~~
reinhardt
Strange, you bring up the fact that you switched to English and then
completely ignore it as a potential factor in the conclusion.

~~~
indrax
I think it was relevant in that he was starting from scratch with a new
audience.

------
icefox
It could be as simple as 95% of people expected some sort of reward for
blogging. This could be ads from traffic, comments saying how smart you are or
just tons of hits to stroke your ego.

I have a half dozen blogs for different things, my favorite is this one where
I post my crazy ideas so I stop myself from actually implementing them and can
come back to them later if I still like the idea a week/month later
<http://ideasfrommydreams.blogspot.com/>

In the six years I have had it there has been a total of 3301 page views and
maybe five comments and I am ok with that because that isn't where it provides
me with value. If comments or page views mattered I would have abandoned this
blog years ago.

~~~
mol2103
Ha! That blog is an awesome idea. So may ideas left to die (or...live on?) - I
can completely relate...believe me. If you ever wanted guest contributors to
THAT, I think there are probably a few others who can relate who read HN.

~~~
icefox
Hmm interesting idea. If anyone is interested in guest blogging on a blog with
such "high traffic" shoot me an email. Or I could spin up an ideaplanet (like
<http://planetqt.org/>) to aggregate blogs of such caliber.

------
tjr
I started blogging about five years ago, more or less in the manner you
describe. Wrote an excited post or two or three right away, then maybe another
in a week or two, and then... slowly stopped. Then a year later picked it up
again, and then stopped.

I tried a variety of blog tools. I first had a blog at MIT, then when they
killed that service, I tried several of the hip new services like Tumblr,
Typepad, and Posterous. I stuck with Posterous the longest, but most recently
moved to Wordpress running on my own virtual server. Along the way, I've kept
some of my favorite posts from abandoned services, and deleted others that I
no longer felt were worth sharing.

But why not write consistently? In my case, I suppose I feel like I frequently
have nothing original to add to a topic. There are lots of things I could
write about, but why should I, when somebody else already has?

Does it make sense, though, that a blog ought to be held to the standards of
original research and contributions to a topic? It's a _blog_ , not a doctoral
thesis. So maybe that doesn't make any sense. What, then, should be the
purpose of writing, if not to create brand new thoughts?

Expressing who you are and what you know may be reason enough. I would rather
hire a consultant that had displayed their knowledge of their field through
writing than somebody who just posted a list of skills they had, and I'm more
likely to find somebody who can do a particular task if they have written
about it than if they had just done the task and posted it on GitHub.

Blogging can be useful to market yourself as a consultant, to market your
products you are trying to sell, to make new acquaintances on the web, to
build stronger relations with people you already know, to help you improve as
a writer and as a thinker... there are all sorts of benefits to blogging
besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even
though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.

I imagine that a lot of people do.

And then, there are people who just try blogging, realize they don't like it
or have other things they'd rather do, and never delete the first post. That's
a lot easier to explain, and probably accounts for way more abandoned blogs.
:-)

~~~
acangiano
> there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original
> contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I
> still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.

Part of the problem is that many people see blogging as a teaching tool alone.
More often than not, it's a conversation starter too, and the blogger ends up
learning a great deal of new information in the process.

And even if you wish to be only a teacher with your blog, there is also a bit
of Dunning–Kruger effect at play here. You think, what's the point of me
explaining X? Everyone knows about X, probably better than me. Others wrote
about X.

In truth, you'll find that more often than not plenty of people don't know
about X. The way you'd describe and explain X may actually lead people to
acquire a new prospective on the subject.

~~~
mol2103
Really like the insight you made about conversation starting. The problem is
that most people won't believe they can actually attract the audience needed
to create a fertile conversation on their blog.

~~~
edibrac
Philosophically speaking, doesn't this boil down to having something
meaningful to discuss? Otherwise you're just generating web noise but we're
all guilty of that.

------
kgtm
95% of blogs are abandoned for the same reason 95% of projects never
materialize, which in fact is the same reason 95% of life changes remain new
year resolutions: _Procrastination_.

The Postary announcement states:

 _Postary - the simplest way to share posts with no strings attached, no
obligations and no expectations. Postary reduces the Blog Lifecycle down to
step four: if you are inspired to say something, then just post it and share
it with the world_

Similarly to suggestions for product landing pages, you do not state _how_
Postary will help me with that, i.e. how the procrastination factor is dealt
with. Is there gamification? E-mail reminders? Where is the cheese? Expand on
that "simplest way" to sell the idea on me.

Additionally, I will not click-through the "Write a post" button since it
requires a Twitter account. Why do I need to login to Twitter, assuming I do
have a Twitter account, if you haven't convinced me that there is a reason to
waste a couple of minutes of my time?

To sum things up, what differentiates you from, say, Blogspot, Tumblr,
Wordpress et al? I can "just post it and share it with the world" over there
too.

~~~
mol2103
Thanks for the feedback. We did this in 8-10 hours - we left a lot out :)

The difference I guess is that we tried to create a blogging service that
isn't a blog you need to maintain to feel good about.

~~~
lancewiggs
I agree on the Twitter thing - open this up to anyone, let them grab a login
with Twitter if they want, have a secret admin url if they want or have no
editing ability at all - if they want.

------
tibbon
I've abandoned several blogs. No, I'm not happy about this.

Why abandon a blog that I've put a great deal of time, even years, into?

For me, it comes down to few things, but mainly a work vs reward measuring.
Doing a good (or even decent) blog takes a lot of work. I'm honestly not the
best writer in the world, and creating a blog that's on topic consistently and
creating that amount of rich content is just hard.

I found my traffic was always good if I could blog at least 3x/week, but
really 1x/day was the very best. Even if you're doing that by sitting down and
queuing up content for the week, that's a _lot_ of effort (generally an entire
day) just to blog consistently.

What I always wanted to do, was to get together a group blog with 5-10
friends, which we could all contribute to on some semi-consistent topic (like
Mashable, Techcrunch, etc but smaller in scope and goal). Then each person
doing 1-2 things a week would be totally sufficient and keep things
interesting.

Yet, the reward for this was always pretty low. I didn't like putting ads on
my site. Amazon referral links were pretty good on occasion, but if you don't
have a product oriented blog (or huge traffic) it still barely paid for
hosting. So 1 day/week (15% of your time) for that much coming back to me was
pretty low.

------
LargeWu
Because writing well is really hard, and people don't realize that before they
start.

~~~
matwood
Not only is good writing hard, but technical writing is even harder. I have a
blog with a few articles on technical topics, but it takes a lot of time to
write, edit, and make sure everything is correct. To put something up at the
quality level I want ends up taking too much time and interfering with working
on my projects.

------
pnathan
Because I realized that 99% of what I want to write about is textual
flatulence to the rest of the world, and I got tired of the narcissism
inherent in that 99%.

I do keep 3 bloggy things, but 2 only get updated with useful info, and the
other is where I mumble about my personal life (which no one but me cares
about generally).

------
droz
I think a lot of blog abandonment is a consequence of shifting priorities.

I started my most recent blog back in 2008 to keep track of the projects I was
working on and to build a body of work that I could present along with a
resume.

A lot of the content I tried to capture was original work I had done; some of
it was writing about something I had learned and tried to apply to a proof of
concept.

I went with a monthly format and for awhile this worked out well, but as soon
as summer would come around- priorities would change and content wouldn't
resume until November.

I've gone through that cycle the past four years and this past year I simply
haven't had the motivation to stick with it due to projects at work draining
me of my enthusiasm and deciding that there are better ways to spend my time
than constantly parked in front of a computer.

~~~
mol2103
What would make you stick to it? Or am I asking the wrong question: Does it
even matter to you that you do stick to it?

~~~
droz
I'm sure that I'll find myself updating it again. I think if I still had the
motivation and focus I did when I was younger, I would be able to stick with
it. But when blue skies and mountain calls you, you got to answer.

------
cbs
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.

~~~
mol2103
Why not connect your Twitter account? We won't post anything on your
behalf...perhaps we should have made that clearer :/

~~~
guga31bb
I neither have nor want a Twitter account, but even if I did, there's no
reason to want to link it to this service.

------
eslachance
You forgot two points in your lifecycle: \- Irregular posts apologizing for
not posting more often. \- Various defeated remarks about "not being read by
anyone, anyway".

At least, that's how my personal blog (and a few I tried starting) went, in
addition to what you already mention.

I think that it's an awesome ideas, the same way services like "twitpic" offer
hosting of free-floating images without the need for a hosting, you offer
free-floating blog posts without the setup. I like it!

~~~
mol2103
Glad you like it. Feel free to pimp it/use it whenever you want :)

Anyway - if we can find the time, we may release new features in the near-term
that will make it even more interesting! Or we might just procrastinate and
not do anything...

------
yonasb
I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but not sure about your solution.
People start blogs because they want their own space to share their thoughts.
If they wanted to share their thoughts on someone else's site, they'd comment
on a post, use fb, or a million other things. I think you're missing a key
piece to why ppl start their own blogs, because it's theirs and they have the
freedom to do whatever they want, they have a sense of ownership. I signed up
for your service but I won't use it because I want my own space. I'm starting
a blog and will probably follow the path you laid out, but at least I'll have
my own space.

------
acangiano
Correct me if I'm wrong but you are essentially offering what Google+ and
TwitLonger.com offer already. When a person is inspired, they can post and
share with their friends a longer post, with no strings attached.

This will undoubtably work for some, and if you market it properly, you may
create a spot for your service; but I'm not sure this is the cure to the 95%
of blogs are abandoned problem.

A traditional blog is a lot more work, but it can provide you with an
unbelievable degree of rewards and benefits. I think many of these benefits
will be lost for those who opt to use your service, at least in its current
incarnation.

In my book on technical blogging (<http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-
blogging>) I provide a different antidote to abandonment syndrome. I suggest a
careful plan and road map that can lead virtually anyone who follows the steps
to succeed early on.

Careful planning, knowing what to write and when, learning how to deal with
writer's block, and achieving a degree of success early on, all contribute to
eliminating the abandonment problem.

Who would abandon a blog that is read by thousands, it's making them money,
and helping them further their career? Not many, I suspect, despite the weekly
effort required to achieve such goals.

~~~
mol2103
Regarding, TwitLonger and Google+ - yes, the distinction is not strong. We've
built a POC but want to add features that make each post more "special."
Because we're divorcing posts from blogs, each post can look different :)

I hear you on the antidote, but I'm not sure it will work for most people. In
fact, many people don't have an "expertise" to share and are looking to post
thoughts about non-work-related material.

------
zerostar07
And if you want to blog without any strings attached (not even twitter),
there's <http://instablogg.com>

~~~
edibrac
Oh ya. Here's another blog without any strings attached: <http://pastebin.com>

~~~
zerostar07
but ... but it has no comments!!

~~~
edibrac
Here's a comment response (<http://pastebin.com/rb8jVP5y>) to my original post
(<http://pastebin.com/kkAyryLT>)

postery should integrate pastebin as a backend! And then usenet. Or email.

------
personlurking
I've been blogging for 3.5 years on informational topics, which is to say I
share what I learn in my own research on certain topics.

My main blog, which I've had the longest, has 500K hits, with an average of
between 12K-16K per month. Am I happy with that? Sure, but it's not a money-
maker. From what I've read, one needs to attract upwards of 100K
visitors/month to be able to make some money from it. Currently, 130 people
subscribe to my main (Wordpress) blog, though I don't believe WP offered the
'subscribe' widget the entire time I've been with them.

In the meantime, I've used the main blog's template, topic-wise, to create
around 10 other blogs on other subjects. I eventually got burnt out and
consolidated to 3 but then I deleted the least popular and stopped updating
the second to last.

At my height, which I sustained for around 3 years, I was posting between one
and two posts per day. For the main blog, I also made cards to hand out and
tees to sell.

What I essentially did the majority of my time is curation and curation is a
lot easier (if you know how to do it) than coming up with original content,
which is what I've been doing with the main blog for most of 2011 when I
switched gears. 'Coincidentally', this is also when many readers said bye-bye.

People I share links with, who blog on the same topic, usually write personal
blogs and a few of them get 20-50 comments with every post. I, on the other
hand, am lucky if I get 2-3. Basically, I get more hits but less comments.

All in all, I see my retirement from blogging in the near future because I
feel I've mastered the topic (culture, by the way). It is said that it takes
8000-10000 hours of study to become an expert on something (a mark which I
passed a few years back). The only problem is I'm a generalist at heart.

------
tsotha
Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would spend a lot of time on a blog.
Well, I take that back. The top .0000001% of bloggers make a lot of money. But
for everyone else, well, writing (good writing, anyway) is hard work.

If you just dash off whatever comes to mind nobody will bother reading what
you've written, so you're wasting your time. If you put a lot of time and
energy into your posts then at some point you've put in the same amount of
effort it would have taken to write a book, but you have less to show for it.

I guess if you just enjoy writing a blog it's fine. But like any hobby it will
get old eventually, so it doesn't surprise me so many are abandoned.

The blogs that seem to be successful over the long run are either news-
aggregation type affairs, where it's mostly just links with a pithy joke or
two thrown in, or they're single subject blogs with multiple people sharing
the load. It's just too much work for one person to generate enough original
content to hold the attention of a regular reader base.

------
kb101
This is a great concept... I think where it could differentiate itself is by
aggregating posts by topic. If I'm searching some topic on the web, I often
come across blogs that are out of date or orphaned, and they might provide me
with some of the information or links I am looking for, but not all.

If Postary lets me find several such blogs on its site, organized into blog
threads by topic, then it fills a need on both sides: the author gets to
broadcast to the web without the pressure of maintaining a blog site or
Twitter feed, etc... and the reader is able to find information or commentary
on a topic of interest.

It could be almost like a message board, instead of thread topics there are
topics (several of which might apply to any given Postary post) and instead of
responses to that topic, a threaded view of Postary posts. The threaded view
would be composed on-the-fly and would vary depending on what you search for.

To make it more interesting and engaging, each Postary could have the option
of being maintained as a blog if the writer so wished... and further, each
Postary could allow comments from readers.

So you could post your thoughts about Haskell the day you discover and get
really excited by it; and that could be tagged under topics like Haskell,
programming philosophy, programming tips, etc. If somebody searched Postary
for Haskell, they would see your post along with all others on the same topic,
plus comments, plus follow-on posts (if any) by the same author. Threads could
be auto-composed based on any number of criteria (newest first, most-
responded-to first, etc.)

In this way, the site could serve both the "web archaeology" and "latest and
greatest info" niches of search, and could create a lighter, less pressured
form of engagement with authors and readers. Isolated, sporadic posting by
authors could be organized into a coherent, constantly-updated site on any
number of topics.

~~~
Miso_Vegan
Really like this idea!

------
roberthahn
I'm thinking about rebooting my blog.

For me, the problem is the inherent sense of obligation implied when
organizing posts by date. My last post was written April, 2009, which reported
that I redesigned and restaged my blog.

Ironic, isn't it?

There are many ways to solve this problem. Postary's picked a really good one,
and I'm looking forward to seeing how people responds to using them. But I
know it's not the only way to address this problem.

These days I'm rethinking the way I write and publish. I like easy-to-publish.
I like self-hosting. I don't want databases - static site generation for me
please. I like blending in my activities on other sites (like Twitter). I
don't like date-based organization (it doesn't make sense for the way I do my
writing).

So I'm looking for (or writing) tools that support folksonomy-based URI
navigation (which supports organic site growth), easy-publish, and importing
and reformatting data from other social networks. If you have any pointers,
send 'em my way.

------
chipsy
Definitely piqued my interest. I like that it works with Twitter, since it's
an obvious "share point." But with this type of system people should have the
option of posting their work anonymously.

The other thing I think this type of system should do is to aggregate the
content. Encourage tagging and referencing of posts throughout the system,
rather than siloing to a single author, and find ways to rank the content.
Youtube is a good model. Rationale as follows:

I am often inspired on the spur of the moment to write detailed comments of
sizes between a few paragraphs to the length of a short essay. And yet I know
that most comments end up buried forever in an old discussion thread, never
seeing the light of day again, regardless of their value.

So my thinking is that if we had a system that blurs "comments" and "articles"
and tried to facilitate a discussion curated over years instead of hours, more
value could be captured.

------
prawn
This was one of my smaller ideas - the ease of Posterous combined with the
single-designed-page feel of about.me (and others like it). For a long time, I
was looking for somewhere suitable to write up a restaurant review or talk
about a movie or share something else, without committing to a full-scale
blog.

No next or previous post buttons, probably no comments, just a title and body.
Then a pool of photos/themes to present your information nicely. No feeling of
abandonment or fear of commitment.

Not sure without further thought how this could be taken to the next level,
but it's at least a nice side-project worth trying.

------
daimyoyo
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.

------
Detrus
I wonder how many blog posts are abandoned before they're fully fleshed out.
If the percentage is too high it could be a downer for this idea.

Your tool combined with my wondering led to this trolltacular literary
masterpiece. <http://www.postary.com/twitter/Detrus/abandoning-a-post>

------
Miso_Vegan
I'm curious as to how people are defining "success" in these comments. It
seems to revolve around traffic, and perhaps that implies something
(advertising). Me, I guess I define it as having said something that
starts/contributes to a conversation, and that an actual conversation happens.
But how do _you_ define it?

------
john2x
I had a similar weekend project[1] where anyone can write random posts with no
setup required.

It's more bare bones (really bare bones, heh) and allows anonymous posts.

Hmm, even _I_ abandoned posting there, though I'm not much of a poster in the
first place.

[1]: <http://kodig.com/>

------
dasil003
Not to diminish the idea (which I like), but I'm most impressed that they were
able to get postary.com.

~~~
mol2103
+1 to self-indulgent and maniacal domain hunting!!!

------
willpower101
The site reminds me of squidoo. I kind of wonder why I can't click on
someone's username and see everything they've written. What if you feel like
writing a lot on postary? Does it just stay disjointed?

~~~
mitchm
Seeing an index of all the posts someone made is a good idea, it just didn't
make the cut for the first iteration.

------
bennesvig
The two necessary elements of a great blogger: patience and persistence.

Most people don't have either when it comes to blogging since there aren't
really instant rewards for blogging and no pain if they don't blog.

------
dockd
Has anyone quit because of the Haters/Trolls? I found it shocking to write
something I thought might be useful to get feedback like "you're an idiot who
shouldn't have a job". Ouch.

------
Thunderberry
Glad to see this idea finally come to fruition - I tried getting this exact
same thing off the ground last year with no success, but hoping you'll be able
to succeed where I failed!

------
Matt_Mickiewicz
I wish more bloggers knew that they could auction off their blog if it's got a
bit of traffic and collect a check, rather than abandoning it and letting it
die.

------
mol2103
Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on Postary or blog abandonment in general
here! Thanks in advance guys!

~~~
tgrass
Is there a list of posts by poster?

~~~
mol2103
Not yet but this is something multiple people have asked for.

