An article published in the New York Times a short while ago states that the number of bloggers between the ages of twelve and seventeen has been declining. The study takes this particular statistic and uses it to pose the question of whether blogging as a whole is starting to fall out of favor and whether or not its use as an online communication tool has died. Do you feel this is the case? Is blogging, specifically in the online marketing and internet sales arena, dying? What will this imply for online marketers if it turns out to be true? We thought we would look into this query and find out whether or not it is true and what kind of implication this poses for the internet market arena.

The very first thing that we determined is that blogging, mainly in terms of aiding one’s ability to communicate online is not truly dying. First of all, the statistic of kids somewhere between the ages of twelve and seventeen blogging less does not in fact mean that blogging is going to go away. What is in fact happening is that people in this age group are just migrating over to Twitter and, especially, Facebook–the service that offers people the ability to create “notes” which can act in much the same fashion as blog entries and allow the user to control who is able to see what they have written down. Adults are far more likely to produce their own web properties than kidsparticularly because pesky things like parental consent will not be an issue.

We also wanted to take the fact that blogging is challenging under consideration. Blogging is not a one-time sort of pastime. If someone in the website marketing market wants to make money online, blogging can be a great way to do that but you have to be willing to actually commit to the activity. While blogging and site-building reached the peak of its popularity in 2004-2006, lots of Internet Marketers jumped onto the bandwagon thinking that they could make a site really fast that, because it looked like a blog, they could slap up some advertising and sit back and collect earnings. It became apparent really quickly to everyone who tried this that the only way to actually make money with blogging is to be constantly updating the site with new information. This is the reason many Internet marketers have stopped making use of blogging as a key income source.

Google has also recently been working overtime to crack down on the folks who have stolen content from other folks and used it for their own blog and site purposes. This means that on a daily basis hundreds of blogs are being de-indexed by Googlethese are usually the blogs created by people who use software to steal the content off of other sites and put it on their own. With numerous blogs falling off the radar, it would be easy to assume that blogging is dying and these sites are just being shut down. 

The serious truth is that blogging isn’t dying. Blogging is just being better regulated so it is a lot tougher for people to earn money using these mediums. Sure this will likely affect some of the basic and blatant data but we don’t think that blogging is actually going to go anywhere. It is actually starting to be recognized for what it really is: a communication tool. Blogging is usually a much better method for sharing information than it is for earning quick cash.

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