As a father with a business firmly rooted in blogging my mind often turns to the future. More specifically to what the future holds for professional bloggers. Since most professional bloggers are, by their very nature, self employed, we all must keep one eye on the years ahead to make sure that our income streams continue to flow as time rolls by.
I am confident that blogging will continue its meteoric rise right up to the point where having a blog is considered the norm, much like having an email address is today.
Traditional print media will eventually disappear. Just as the oil companies stick their heads in the sand, literally in many cases, trying not to think about the fact that oil will, one day soon, simply run out, the traditional newspaper and magazine publishers will be rendered useless by the more immediate medium of blogging. Mainstream media fights against this tooth and nail at every opportunity but they can’t get away from the fact that their advertising revenue and sales are slipping fast with every passing year.
Blogging, on the other hand, enjoys an upswing of advertising revenue every year as more and more people become bloggers and readership of the medium grows at an astonishing rate.
As decades pass there will obviously be more and more competition in the blogosphere. The turning point will come when the growth rate of blogs exceeds the growth rate of new internet users. At that time the failing blogs will start to wither and be left abandoned as all of the traffic, much like today, follows the quality content. There will be an almost Darwinian evolution of the blogosphere as the weak fall to one side while the strong prosper. Strength will, of course, be measured in links, both number and relevance.
Bloggers who had the foresight to start a blog early enough will, at this hypothetical point in the future, be able to sit back and enjoy a healthy passive income from their blogs. And this will be more important than ever as successive financial crises are pushing traditional pensions slowly down the drain.
I’ve often thought that starting a blog is bit like starting a pension. The sooner you do it the better.
Perhaps I’m looking at the medium through rose tinted spectacles, and I’m sure there will be readers who see the future mapping out very differently. However, I can’t argue with the facts. Blogging makes me a lot of money. More than that, it allows me to make a good income from my career as jazz musician, selling albums that I haven’t even recorded yet. It’s little wonder that I am putting all my eggs in the blogging basket.
Of course, there will always be the scaremongers. The mainstream media dinosaurs who hate the idea of power being moved from the corporate entities to the individual. But it’s very hard to take notice of those who are clearly motivated by fear and jealousy.
Whether I’m right or not only time will tell. But, from where I am standing today, I see the future of professional blogging to be very bright indeed. And it’s path that I am very comfortable staying on for the foreseeable future.
I have always had an interest in writing, but never cared for the way that the big guys went about it… I wanted to write about things that hold my interest, so that I could share that passion with my readers. I also wanted to be able to print my opinion, even if it went against “mainstream” thoughts.
Blogging fits my needs for these and other reasons. Once I begin earning “enough” income from my blog, I will be able to meet some of my life goals while doing something that I enjoy and feel passionately about.
I agree with you. Bloggers who start early have an earlier start to building (or ruining) their reputation! >,<
Interesting comments made but to say that the whole of print media will disappear is ludicrous and unfounded. People will always want to hold and feel a business card, flyer, brochure or book and direct mail works and has done for over a century. As tactile creatures we enjoy touch and in turn we appreciate quality in printed media. Books will be around for longer than your own life span and book readers still buy books.
The internet is just one of many advertising and promotional options available to business and the public and people should never put all of their eggs in one basket. It’s true that print has declined due to the web but it will sustain for a long long time to come. In the UK there is a growing percentage of the market that wish to buy recycled paper for their printing needs, and many printers offer this option, so in the end we can do our best to maintain our forests for future generations to enjoy.
Don’t be blinded by the internet revolution – the next thing you will be telling us is that there will be no high street shops in the future, and we will all stay glued to our computers buying everything online!
Jason – I think you’ve taken what I said a little too literally. I’m not advocating a totally digital society, far from it. I’d hate to see that happen.
Literature will be around in book form for a long time, I agree. But look at this from the point of view of an unpublished author. They could choose to try and get a traditional book deal, something that is made ridiculously tricky by the attitude of the gate keepers to that industry. Or, they could start a blog and promote their writing directly with zero costs. The first method is futile but the second is, if done correctly, a license to print money. No pun intended.
I also take your point about that tactile qualities of paper for things like business cards. However, I genuinely believe that newspapers and many other periodicals are on very thin ice and may evaporate sooner rather than later.
Can you come up with a convincing argument in favor of the traditional newspaper?
Here’s a problem with this discussion. As a professionally trained journalist, with degrees and graduate training in other fields as well, I shudder at the amount of inaccuracy and poor writing that passes for content these days.
Passion is great, and essential to pursuing anything. But it’s not enough without knowledge of how to present information and making sure you do it responsibly. The print media has the upper hand because it has credibility which the web generally lacks because of self-annointed experts. You see it in other fields too. Many professions have members who declare themselves “masters” or, in the music field, “virtuosos.” They do this without any objective credentials.
Sorry, Matthew, but these “Big Boys,” are generally foot soldiers, who have dedicated their lives to words and what they can do to those who take the time to read them. Given the choice, I’ll take the reporter who sits through school board meetings and covers the local crime beat over most bloggers for accuracy and dedication. No insult intended, it’s just more demanding to cover news and get interviews from hostile or reluctant sources.
I guess it depends on whether you want to inform or entertain, and I concede the lines have become blurred for many outlets. The heart of a newspaper is to report on the community and you don’t see that very much in a blog, unless the community is the home and the cute things the kids/dog/cat just did.
People who don’t understand the importance of getting the story right or of disclosing relationships with products they are reviewing do us all a disfavor.
Sure, print media is being reshaped drastically through amputations and it’s painful. Maybe we’re dying, but we’re not dead yet. Blogging may be the way for some, but it’s not either/or and we’re making a mistake if we think so. How do we solve this problem of gaining credibility for bloggers and outlets for journalists?