Why are 95% of blogs abandoned? | Hacker News Reader

Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

postary.com

89 pointsmol210372 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Not everyone has a style that's suited for short or less thought out posts. I get about the same engagement with 500 words and 50, so I don't worry too much about it unless it's something controversial.

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.

I would add one more point: most people don't fundamentally have a writer's disposition. Writing is hard (if it weren't, we wouldn't have so many professional writers, books on writing, and classes on writing). Having something to say and the means to say it is hard. Having something to say, the means to say it, and the desire to write it is even harder. And so on.

I appear to have that disposition, to the point where I wrote about it some here: http://jseliger.com/2011/02/26/on-blogging-altruistically-or... and wrote about why most people probably drift to Twitter and Facebook: they're easier. If you're not fundamentally blogging for yourself, and because you want to write regularly, you're probably not going to "make" it, for whatever value of "make" you might use.

It is much easier to say something on here, facebook or Twitter because it can just purely be the thought you are having.

Once you want to translate that into a blog you really have to flesh it out and ideally read other sources and reference them. We you don't have to but I feel less comfortable just putting something down as opposed to really getting into the idea. Unfortunately all this takes time making me less likely to start it in the first place.

edw519 has mentioned this a bit, very prolific poster that is very well regarded on HN and has a lot to say but struggled to really do it in the blogging medium.

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.

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.

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.

I am one of your feed subscribers for 1-2 years I think and I am happy every time there is a new post.

i am sure 95% of school time diaries were also abandoned.. i abandoned mine at primary school.

I do wonder how many Moleskines are sold today that have more than a few pages used, if that?

Blogs and diaries are a great example of what may be a bigger trend: people often begin projects with high hopes, but due to a lack of a clear vision and/or an overestimation of their long-term motivation, it fizzles.

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. :-)

> 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.

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.

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.

I personally don't dare comment on the Dunning–Kruger because it's possible I'm not skilled enough to understand it.

A very good point. I share a lot of puzzles and tech-notes on my blog. It might appear as a teaching tool to some but for me it is a great learning tool. An idea, a problem or a solution to a problem might exist in our mind in a confused form. But once we have to put it down in words for a larger audience, one has to re-think of the whole idea, problem or solution in a manner that can be expressed to a larger audience. This usually involves re-learning the idea in a simpler way.

In other words, I end up learning a lot in order to maintain a blog. The D-K effect won't bother one if one accepts the fact that a good blog helps you learn as much as it helps your readers learn. It's more about learning together rather than one person trying to teach other.

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.

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.

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.

I agree. I was going to try it out, but wasn't interested in linking my Twitter account without knowing how it did what it says it does.

Needs more explanation on what the service does, perhaps a tour. Let me see how it works then if I want it, I'll link with Twitter.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

> Post Tweets for you.

Hahaha, no.

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

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.

For what it's worth, the need for a Twitter account was a no-go for me too..

This is why (in my case):

You asked for permissions to * See who you follow, and follow new people. * Update your profile. * Post Tweets for you.

This is a no-no for me. I believe you can specify that you want read-only access, which would solve my problem.

Sorry me too, you're asking for too many permissions, why not just read-only if it's auth only?

>Why not

Why In the first place?

I plain old don't want to use my twitter account for this, or be forced to create a throwaway account on a completely unrelated service just to have a throwaway account for yours. And all because you can't be arsed to do any real auth, or allow users to post without accounts at all, which given the nature what you've built makes a whole, whole lot of sense. If I want to have to to make an account as a prerequisite to posting a one-off blogpost, I'll go get a blogger account.

I don't care if you promise a whole huggy bunch not to do anything with my twitter account. I don't trust you and I sure as hell don't trust your website's security.

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!

Yes, but you forgot typical blog post #6 or #7 titled: "Hey guys, send me some topics so I can write about them", which usually predates a permanent 404 by about 10 working days.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

but ... but it has no comments!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Really like this idea!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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/

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Is there a list of posts by poster?

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

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