Why Are So Many Blogs “Dead”?

Although it is widely reported that the number of blogs is rising each day, what is not so widely known is that between 80% to 90% of them are in fact “dead”. Way back in 2007 the blog search engine Technorati was tracking more that 112 million blogs, but even then only 15.5 million of them were regarded as active. There hadn’t been any activity on the rest of them for three months or more. There are some indications that the situation is not much different in 2010.

According to one blogger, who carried out some research into food blogs, the consensus was that between 60% to 80% of all blogs started are abandoned within a month and, at one point, 1.09 million blogs were active for just one day, although the average life expectancy of a blog is 126 days.

So why have so many blogs “died”? In June 2006, Darren Rowse wrote a series of posts on “How to Kill Your Blog Successfully” in which he gave an insight into why it is so difficult for people to maintain their blogs. Based on these posts, here are seven reasons why blogs might get abandoned.

1. Lack of Time and Effort: Some people have neither the time nor the energy to maintain a blog. Creating a good blog can be nearly a full-time job and involves a lot of planning and research if you want to keep it going in the long term.
2. Lack of Passion for the Topic: Some people don’t have enough passion or interest in the topic of the blog. To run a successful blog you need to be passionate about the subject you are writing about. If you don’t have that passion you’ll lose interest in it quite quickly.
3. Is the Topic of Interest to Others? The topic of your blog needs to be of interest to others. Even though you might be passionate about a certain subject, you won’t grow the readership of your blog if other people don’t share your passion.
4. The Topic is Too Wide or Too Narrow: If the topic of your blog is too wide you’ll struggle to keep up with what there is to be said about it, whereas if the topic is too narrow you might find that there isn’t enough to write about.
5. Not Enough Traffic: Bloggers can get disheartened when they find that very few people are visiting their blog and reading their posts. Driving traffic to your blog or website is an art in itself and a great deal has been written about it. It also takes a great deal of time and effort on your part to get your blog noticed.
6. Not Earning Enough Income: Linked to the item above, the blog might not be earning enough money to make it worth the while of the blogger to keep it going. You have to realize that very few blogs generate enough traffic to earn even a modest level of income. There is a huge amount of competition out there!
7. Lack of Reader Interaction: Sometimes bloggers are disheartened because they get very few comments on their posts. They feel as though they are writing in a vacuum and that nobody cares about what they are writing about.