‘What’s the future of Blogging’ Competition Winners

Two weeks ago I asked readers ‘What’s the future of Blogging?‘. The post generated a lot of good comments about what direction blogging will go in the coming years.

Here are what I consider to be the 4 best comments and my reason for choosing them. In this debate I was looking more for comments which raised good points rather than looking at the comment as a whole.

Each of these bloggers will be getting $50 in their PayPal account for their troubles

Tibi Puiu from Lost Art of Blogging wrote

This is a very relative and unpredictable question. It’s like asking what do you think you’ll be doing in 10 years? But I’ll have a go and make a guess.

1. There are currently literally million of blogs out there, in under-developed countries the number of internet users is increasing very rapidly, so the demand will exceed the supply, but not for very long. Like in real life People will have a lot of things to choose from, so they analyze their niche that are interested in and only pick the best.

Competition has grown ever fierce and will grow as well. It’s not like 5 years ago when blogs were a novelty and you could’ve made easy money through them. Now it’s though to get on top and in the near future it will be even harder as competitors grow in numbers.

So what the future of blogging? I would say it’s a bright future, I predict that 1/5 common internet users will have their own personal/related to their needs blog, the market will grow and grow to a unpredictable level. Thanks to search engine ever changing algorithms, young bloggers are given the chance to rank, so it’s not a monopolized market. Only the best stay on top.

Reason : Tibi made an important point about developing countries. Internet usage is climbing fast in Africa and parts of Asia and as a result the number of blogs from these parts of the world are going to increase rapidly as well.

Michael from Pro Blog Design wrote

Blogging will become more and more divided. The popular blogs will get more and more popular, whilst the number of failed blogs gets higher and higher.

Popular blogs will start blog networks, buying out smaller blogs. This will progress to a point where the majority of the A-listers belong to blog networks, or are attached to various companies (Editors in either case).

At that point, blogging has truly become online journalism and people will start to wonder what the hype about the freedom of blogging was really about after all.

(And none of that applies to non-money-making blogs, because they can’t sell out.

Reason : Michael raised a good point about blog networks. I believe in the future more and more blog networks will arise either through blogs being bought out by larger internet companies or from bloggers setting up networks for mutual benefit.

Soccer Blog wrote

There are hundreds of blogs around. And its getting very saturated.

So here’s a brief roundup:

Large blogs will get larger, as more traffic and links go their way.

Some of the large blogs will become portals. Problogger’s new homepage, and Shoemoney’s remake are a steps in that direction.

Small blogs will make enough money for some extra change, though not to pay the bills.

Also, short posts(the style of Twitter) will become popular for personal blogs, as no one wants long posts about what you did or what your dog did.

RSS feeds will decline,and podcasts will rise,as feeds require dedicated time but podcasts can be heard, for example while driving or exercising.

Users will depend on news blogs more than online newspapers, as they have the old style whereas blogs have a refreshing style in terms of design, writing etc.

AJAX will be used for functionality in blogs, rather than design bling-blings. Mainly AJAX for user-interaction.

Designs will move away from Web 2.0 styles, as bloggers get used to requests of simple, lightweight designs with readability.

WP alternatives, notably Habari will get popular with power users.

Non-techies will get used to AdSense etc. and these schemes will become less effective.

Reason : I disagree with a lot of what was said in this comment however it did raise two points in particular which I agree with. (1) Successful blogs will be diversifying and will be moving more away from that of a traditional blog (eg. portal etc) and (2) WordPress alternatives will crop up. There are hundreds of other blogging scripts out there but very few that rival WordPress in my opinion. However, I believe that there is definately a gap in the market for a serious contender to WP’s throne. It might not even be something better, just something different.

Monika from The Writers Manifesto wrote

The future of blogging will be a combination of the following but not limited to it as new technologies surface pretty much every day.

Blogs will be social networks were like minded bloggers come together and blog towards a common purpose. They rise of vlogs or incorporated video into blog posts will also be huge.

I also believe that bloggers will more and more shy away from advertising platforms like Goggle adsense as they don’t work for the masses but more so incorporate 3rd party advertising instead.

I totally disagree with those who said that small blogs are to go and only big ones are to stay. Small blogs can and will become trend setters by using various forms of attraction marketing such as competitions and allowing others to share the blog for revenue.

Blogging after all is about passion and sharing what we know with the world, it is also about networking with others and this will always be part of the future.

Reason : Small blogs are definately going to stay. Although we may see large blogs gain more popularity, the majority of blogs on the internet will still be private blogs and low traffic blogs.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion and best of luck next time to those who just missed out (It wasn’t easy deciding the winners as there was some very good comments).

Could the 4 winners above please contact me with your paypal email address.

Thanks,
Kevin