Ton up

After just short of 20 months of work on this site I’ve reached post #100, prompting me to check on how I compare with the average blogger in terms of prolificness and longevity.

My posting rate of 5 per month is pretty poor, judging by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which says that the mean for active bloggers is 10 posts per month. I have got up to speed recently, managing 31 posts in the last three months, after a particularly fallow period in the summer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a drop in my productivity over January though; I’m never particularly motivated about anything in the middle of the winter.

The same report gives the figure of 3 years for the average blogging tenure, though 51% of bloggers are onto at least their second blog, so the lifespan of individual blogs must be a bit less. I’d guess that the average is made up of a few long-standing examples, and many more brief experiments, so I feel I’ve done quite well to last this long.

Googling all this stuff has opened my eyes to the whole industry that exists just to write about blogging, producing articles in mainstream publications like Businessweek and Forbes, dedicated sites like The Blog Herald, and countless individual blogs on the subject, not to mention the blog indexing services like Technorati and Icerocket. It gives the impression that the business of blogging is thriving, but, much like the economic picture in Second Life, when you look at the actual figures it doesn’t appear so rosy. The Technorati report reveals that even the top 10% (by revenue) of blogs bring in an average of only $19000 a year, and even that figure is skewed by a few high earning sites.

Not that my traffic is anything like heavy enough to sustain any dreams I might have about becoming a professional blogger. It is up a lot since I started tagging my posts, but I’ve more or less accepted that Second Life Shrink will forever be a niche product.