Blogs are the source of conversations

US blogosphere statistics

These figures are not 100% statistics but projections. It has to be said that the analysts are resolutely optimistic with regards to blogs, at least for the US market at any rate. This trend is confirmed by BlogPulse which counted close to 150 million active blogs : state of the blogosphere in 2010.

From a global sample group it shows most of all that the blogosphere is dominated by English, and due to this fact, English speakers represent the largest group of blog users. The report additionally confirms that there is a trend towards a stabilisation of the number of bloggers. Several different phenomena can provide an explanation for this stagnation:

• competition is becoming more and more fierce due to the professionalisation of the blogosphere (which may cause the least motivated new bloggers to renege);

• there are other easier alternatives for occassional bloggers or writers, such as Tumblr or Posterous (and to a certain degree) Twitter);

• the large platforms like MySpace or Skyblogs are struggling against competition from Facebook;

• the concentration of platforms accelerates the shutting down of inactive blogs (recent illustration of this with the with the moving of blogs from Live Spaces to WordPress : WordPress.com will likely receive far less than 30 million users from Windows Live Spaces).

(…) On the other hand, another study carried out by Forrester provides a more interesting perspective: a global update of social technographics. This study compiled the data of 275,000 web users and highlights the emergence of a new category of users; the “conversationalists”

Break down of social media users in Europe (source Forrester)

This new category represents almost one third of social media users and has stopped the growth curve of the adjacent categories in its tracks (creators and critics). The slight drop in blog growth can therefore be explained by a boom in quick conversations and chats which appeases users’ need to express themselves:

Evolution of social media usage worldwide (source : Forrester)

On a European and even French level, some content creators are falling back on a less work-intensive form of expression (around 11% of French adults are ‘social’ content creators).

Does this trend spell the end of blogs? No, not at all, quite the opposite!

Blogs are the raw material of conversations

We have just seen that Darwin’s mechanism can be applied to the blogosphere: only the highly motivated subsist, the others evolve. However, this evolution is not synonymous with a change in the balance of power: bloggers are in the minority, but they are still in the limelight. On the one hand, because quick conversations don’t arise spontaneously, they necessarily are nourished by raw material of some kind (posts). On the other hand, because the audience volumes of conversational platforms (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) reinforce the visibility of written material. In other words: the fewer bloggers there are, the more they benefit from increased visibility as they are not having to ‘compete’ on their platform: a blog is a better social media hub than Twitter.

This reinforces what I had observed a few months ago with regards to content quality on Facebook: the most interesting conversations arise and prosper in close proximity to content (blogs) and lose interest the further they stray from this content (relayed by a multi-linked chain on Facebook and Twitter).

Conclusion: even if the figures show a concentrated audience (quantitative criterion) on Facebook, blogs are the influencing source (qualitative criterion). The most pertinent thing to do would be to set up a system which is both qualitative (on the most popular blogs and forums) and quantitive (on platforms like Facebook and Twitter which will widen the scope of an article or a discussion).

This post has been shortened by E-Blogs with the author’s agreement.