Blogging, Online

U.S. Bloggers Need Social for Traffic, At Least For Now

198818Some interesting stats in this new study of the habits of U.S. blog publishers.

It’s almost exactly a 50/50 split in terms of those who post anywhere from weekly to several times a day and those who post less frequently, including “at irregular intervals,” which translates to “whenever the mood strikes them.”

When it comes to media, most include an image while only 12% include a video and even fewer include audio.

Most interesting to me, almost all – 93.2% – of bloggers rely on social media links to drive traffic back to the posts they write. Other percentages use SEO and email marketing while only a few use paid promotions in any way.

That last point is really poking around in my mind, particularly in terms of new options for content distribution like Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles and more that host content themselves as opposed to driving traffic elsewhere. While the entire media industry has been focused on how that’s going to impact the economics of large publishers like The New York Times and others, the paradigm change is going to have an even greater effect on individual bloggers.

Traffic to individual blogs used to come via links on other blogs, RSS click-throughs and search, either through a general search engine like Google or Yahoo or blog-specific search tools like Technorati. But now professional blogging has become such a race for ad dollars that sending traffic elsewhere doesn’t make sense, so most links just go to previous posts or tag pages. Then as social networks like Facebook and Twitter came on the scene those supplanted what had come before and became the new source of lots of traffic.

But that meant traffic was subject to the whims of the stream (Twitter) or the Newsfeed (Facebook), the latter of which was constantly changing, often not to the benefit of independent publishers. And now with Instant Articles and other native content apps we’re entering a world where traffic is no longer even a possibility and in fact is something the social networks are actively working against. Facebook doesn’t *want* to send you traffic.

That means these individual voices – the ones who were so important a decade or more ago when blogging first took off as they provided valuable opinions and knowledge outside the mainstream – may be silenced. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but if there’s nothing in it for people to keep putting out their personal blogs on any of a variety of topics because they don’t see any traffic and therefore can’t use the blogs as either an income stream or a tool to help them in their professional lives, then those people may decide to just stop doing it. And that’s a huge net loss for everyone.

The alternative and more positive scenario is that while the mainstream media plays Facebook’s game on its turf and by its rules (right up until the moment Facebook swallows the entire industry as publication after publication goes bankrupt), the world of bloggers returns to its original state. There’s a very real possibility that in two years this has reverted back to a world of links, networks of friends making on-domain comments and more.