Does Blogging Have a Future?

I’m a committed blogger and I absolutely love blogging here on WordPress. But I am concerned about the future of blogging, because technology is evolving rapidly, and the way in which people consume content has changed a lot and is continuing to change. In this post I’ll be offering a few reflections concerning what I feel is happening. I’d love to get your thoughts on this.

Social Media

Reading blog posts requires patience. While social media apps like Instagram offer gratification in just a few seconds, blog posts represent a greater time investment, which may be less appealing to busy people. Children are growing up addicted to their smartphones, and scrolling through social media feeds requires less concentration than committing to reading a 1000 word blog post, for example. This is one thing that poses a challenge for us bloggers.

The Rise of Video and Audio

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet (behind Google). This evidences the fact that people are very keen to consume video content these days. The ability to watch videos on a wide range of devices, including of course smartphones, means that watching content is easier than ever before. The experience of watching video on a smartphone is much better than the experience of reading articles, mainly due to screen size. Most blogs don’t look good on mobile devices. Video also requires less intent concentration than reading blog posts.

In terms of audio, podcasts are incredibly popular at the moment, because you can listen to a podcast while going for a run or cleaning the kitchen, and it’s just not possible to do this with a blog post.

Changes in Our Attention Spans

Have you had the experience of seeing a long post and feeling so daunted by it that you simply close the page and move on? The post might contain amazing content, but the time investment just feels too much. I believe that as content consumers many of us are becoming impatient these days.

Quality is Declining

It’s not uncommon to see blog posts where little or no attention has been given to crafting a great piece of content. Many posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, and many bloggers don’t even consider such things to be important. The fact that there are so many thousands of blogs of this type may have given blogging a bad reputation. I’m very proud to call myself a blogger, but it seems that many people who call themselves bloggers that are not really committed to putting in the time and effort required to craft posts into valuable content. When I say to people “I’m a blogger!”, I think the response is often an internal groan that kind of says, “So what? Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?”

What’s the Solution?

I’m sure that one of the motivations behind the new WordPress Gutenberg editor is that those in charge are trying hard to keep up with the competition. But from what I can gather the new editor hasn’t had an amazing response. The editor can feel rather complicated to use, and this is another barrier to creating great content.

But what we must do is create great content.

Thankfully, reading and writing remain very popular activities. We may need to consider more carefully the way we write blog posts in a changing world. Incorporating more video and audio might be beneficial. Also, writing our content in a concise way and breaking up the text using formatting and images are some things that could help. Considering how our blogs look to people reading on tablets and smartphones is important.

Three Examples of Great Blogs

If you’re looking for inspiration regarding how you can up your blogging game in 2019, here are a few blogs to check out.

Little Grey Box
This travel blog offers great content and is rich in video and images. Posts are regular and well written.

Retrospective Lily
Lily’s blog posts are always very well crafted and easy to read. They aren’t overly long but always offer value.

YariGarciaWrites
Yari’s writing blog is attractive and well formatted. Her posts are of a good length and are always interesting and thought-provoking.

What are your thoughts on the future of blogging? What are your favourite blogs and why? Please let me know in the comments below!