Hello everyone,
Today we'll talk about something different and analyze why the rate of creation of new blogs is slowing down in these last years. As you may remember from an old post over the life and death of anime blogs we heard many times of the impeding death of the anime blogosphere by many popular sources/bloggers.
While this is still not truth (I see some blogger start up with their new projects even in these days) there are signs of changing in this small community of the internet due to a phenomenon I would call "lack of diversification" on which we'll dedicate some time later in this post.
Did anybody remember when, many years ago, the web was littered with websites with little to none interaction with the user apart from the email box?
Those were the dark age of the web, when hosting a website was a costly hobby and internet connections weren't as fast as the present one. Yes, it was before the concept of blog was born as we know it today.
When the blog concept had his boom in the 2004/2005 with the introduction of many free platforms, the anime blogosphere grew massive in terms of mere months with many new blogs appearing everyday.
I was still a reader back then and was pretty in awe to the incredible quantity of informations the enthusiasts were publishing on the web.
The reasons of the creation of a new blog were vary, from trying to create a big community, the ones trying to become famous and someone was even just a bit bored. Some of these bloggers are still out there, many others not.
What has changed from those times? Why all the old timers are only counting the days before the anime blogosphere will slowly die? I think there are two reasons behind this downfall phenomenon, let's go analyze them one by one.
The first reason influencing this change is because of the introduction of the new social tools like Facebook/Twitter/Google+ that are slowly removing many from the blogger position they were until years ago because these tools allow for smaller/easier comunications between groups of peoples.
Blogging is not an easy job unfortunately and not even a well rewarded one. It's not easy to get a readership (the first step when opening a blog) and even more difficult to actually get some feedback by someone on the web.
Even if you use a free prepared platform like WordPress to avoid any technical work, you would still have to actually write a post with some useful information in it and that will suck up a lot of time most people don't want to spend now that they have the social tools.
The second reason is the saturation and lack of diversification in the anime blogging world. Two interconnected issues that are the basis leading to today's situation in which many aspiring bloggers are scared of entering this world.
If you try to give a look around to the 230 still alive blogs indexed by AnimeNano you'll notice how many of them are just the carbon copy of Omni's original Random Curiosity or similiarly famous blogs.
What's the problem with it? I think there are no problems as this is after all an hobby, but after the number of blogs in a particular category grow up the saturation start to take its toll making difficult for anyone new to enter in a particular category in a successfull way scaring out potential bloggers.
This is where diversification would help creating new niches where to positionate your blog and still get your share of readership. Unfortunately, this is the main thing that the english anime blogosphere is missing in this moment.
I can easily divide the blogs into four main categories to encompass the whole range of the anime blogs available on the net :
1) Episodic blogs that is blogs with a big grid of screenshots so dense that can make useless to watch the real show, a small synopsis and some impressions over the episode the blogger just watched.
2) "News" blogs that write twitter length informations you can find pretty much in every corner of the earth with no kind of editorial thinking/impressions.
3) Pure editorial (or maybe should I say "essay") blogs that while they have some interesting talk from time to time they post with a very low frequency.
4) Funny blogs that will just focus on random anime topics trying to make fun of the argument of the day
That's it! There are few, rare blogs that go out of these preconditions sometimes merging multiple categories together, but they are unfortunately the minority.
We lack any creativity or new way of blogging from like years in the anime blogosphere and apart from some original, funny and smart idea like Scamp's "Terribad" video series we lurk repeating more of the same.
This blog, 9 months ago, did start with the idea of creating a wallpaper directory, but with no intention of doing episodics, nor anime reviews and not even editorials to be honest.
Somehow I ended up following all three categories and I still plan to in the future, but I sometimes wonder what can I do to improve my style and add new elements that may improve the reader satisfaction.
I tried many formats in the past and tried to improve the quality of the posts like with the videos I create and use every episodic post since around two months ago, but I slowly realized its difficult to innovate!
And you? What do you think the anime blogosphere needs to start attracting new bloggers and increasing the quantity/quality of information offered?
What are you doing with your blog (if you have one) to distinguish yourself from the armies of other blogs?
What do you suggest to us bloggers to improve our content?
See you soon,
feal87