How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)
Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.
The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.
The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content.
Highlights from the report include the following:
- Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.
- Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.
- Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.
- Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.
- Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. "Trackbacks are taking a nose dive," Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, "bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown."
- Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."
For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009...
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All the trends in media point toward streams and pushing older data down in relevance: the Twitter and Facebook streams for example.
Potential causes for this change:
SEO - search engines are now starting to weight blog content higher than ever either because there is so much more of it, or because it’s original content
Social networks - perhaps sharing takes more time than a day. A retweeted link or shared video on Facebook could take a week or so to make the rounds before hitting it big by finding its way to maven.
I bet that the SEO has much more to do with it. That’s why self-publishing platforms like Scribd are so great.
http://expostfacto.tumblr.com/post/246303630/blogging-analysis-points-to-value-of-self-publishing
Very interesting, however I would wonder what the numbers would be for on site articles and how they affect the social web?
Content sharing is important but is this value higher or lower than what would be were there a blog? I have so many questions but I do believe that the social web is definitely here to stay.
And God, isn't it going to really take off once developing countries such as Africa and India have affordable mainstream broadband.
MJ
Great article Marshall. I'm surprised and pleased about the 29% finding which suggests to me that blogging will continue to play a big role even as FaceBook, Twitter, and other social networking mediates more and more online activity.
A growing problem with social media is that it really seems to be feeding our short attention spans with short attention span material, but if more thoughtful material is referenced I think we'll be OK, and our brains won't completely rot out of our heads ... at least not for a few years.
@Tom: A big driver for the first hour are the ranking formulas at most social sites. Digg, Reddit, etc., all have decay factors which drag older content down the news stream. (i.e. an older story needs a lot more votes to get to the top than a newer one). Also, based on anecdotal evidence, wandering stories finding a maven are still a relatively low occurence -- or at least, I did not see any statistical evidence of a strong trend like that.
@Elizabeth: The numbers are for original content posted on mainstream media sites and blogs combined. The 'off-site' engagement are the comments and sharing activity, but that activity is all tied back to the original site.
Keeping blogging and tweeting won't be out any time.
I have been thinking about these stats for a while now. The hard thing about them is there is no way of knowing how long the social media sites will play such a big role. I wonder whether they will fade out as quickly as they rose and people will be back to commenting?
Great work.
Ramsay
Even though the trend seems to favor the activity generated by the marketing channels, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc. it always comes back to the hub of where the experience originated reinforcing the consistency of the brand.
As the social networks begin to accept API's as well as give them out, they will begin to become true discovery agents where the publisher will be able to post from their own website once and push out their content to their trusted network.
Fast forward 5 years and tell me people are going to still login into 20 different networks to post. They will post from their own website which will feed out to 20 different networks. Comments will be pulled in to the main website from all of the networks which will carry their branding and possibly their advertisers.
Maybe the term blogging and commenting will become less relevant and a "conversation" will become more relevant.
In the past, people would blog about a topic they thought was interesting.
Now they just link to it on their Twitter.
They do this also in place of comments since the Tweet will contain a comment.
Simple.
With more people creating blogs so there are more people out there wanting to obtain engagement - so they get involved on other blogs and spread their presence.
Basically a lot of readers are actually (or becoming) bloggers; I wonder what that stat is.