Ths credit crunch has affected many companies around the world and forced many large blog networks to cut jobs, staff rates and the amount they spend on advertising. Not everyone thinks this is necessarily a bad thing. John “wardrox” from Negative Gamer wrote a fantastic post yesterday entitled Could The Recession Reorder The Blogosphere?.
John reckons that the large blogging websites will be most affected. He notes :
They are left in a rather worrying position. They can’t scale themselves down to save money (people use them for all the news. If they cant provide that constantly, readers simply leave) so simply fold.
I have to agree with John on this. Many large blog sites generate huge levels of traffic and readership through a constant flow of news, with some posting dozens of times a day. If they cut jobs it means there is less people to cover the latest news stories so the posting frequency will be reduced, which means less traffic. Less pageviews means less advertising revenue as well.
John believes that smaller blogs will not be affected as much during this economic slowdown. He believes that smaller blogs can take 1 of 4 possible routes.
- Fade away into further obscurity. Often, the owner doesn’t have the devotion, time or passion to continue.
- Stay roughly the same size. Some sites are happy sticking with a very consistent size. Maybe their content is niche, or maybe the person in charge simply doesn’t want to grow the site and encounter all the accompanying growing pains.
- Try to turn into IGN or Kotaku. This is often seen as the dream for many small blog owners. These are the blogs that simply want readers and money. If they could update their site 500 times per day, they would be happy. Seeing how apparently successful the larger news sites are, they want in on that pie.
- Maintain the niche, but continue to grow (this is what I want from NG). You keep the ideas and style, but allow the place to grow slowly. Up until a few years ago, this approach was all but impossible.
Route 4 is the way a lot of blogs develop. I do believe that some investment into your blog, particularly at the start of it’s life, can really help the growth of your blog. However blogs which grow organically are more stable and less likely to see traffic and revenue fluctuate during good and bad times. Also, sometimes spending more money on your blog is not always the best way forward. I’ve seen many bloggers throw good money after bad and they have struggled to recuperate their outgoings.
I wouldn’t say that BloggingTips is a large blogging website but since I do pay some bloggers to write for the blog it is more susceptible to market conditions (something which blogs with no staff won’t be affected by). I haven’t seen a drop in revenue or traffic but I’m sure if I had 50 staff things would maybe be a little different.
I believe that most BloggingTips readers run smaller blogs however many of you write for larger blogs so you may have unfortunately had your blogging rate reduced or lost your blogging gig altogether.
Has the credit crunch affected you in some way?
Related Link : Could The Recession Reorder The Blogosphere?
I have had websites for a while but have only just in the last few days launched a logo design blog at http://www.logodesignblog.co.uk
The credit crunch is something I have considered but I am not looking to make money off of the blog so hopefully should not make any difference to the visitors with it only being a small blog and requiring only weekly updates that I will take care of myself. Although it has taken up quite a lot of time! Thank you for sharing your post, hopefully the blogging world is not hit too hard by the troubled economy.
I've got to agree with you on this. In fact, I think what has happened to large banks, large insurance companies, and even the auto industry gives evidence that in every walk of life, large means vulnerable. The bigger they are, the harder they fall because scaling back is nearly impossible.
I think once you review it. You will see that it isn't really as good as it sounds. Borderline horrible imo.
Well, with blog my size – as long as I can find some change in pockets and pay for hosting I am fine.
A great advantage of running a small blog is that you have minumum overheads. A lot of the more frequently updated blogs incorporate freelancers as well as the original author. When times get hard and earnings tighten you still need to pay these guys, if you don't then your site gets updated with new content less frequently and can have the knock on effect of reducing your readership, lessening earnings even more.
Well..my personal thoughts is that economic slowdown will definitely affect the blogging world marginally…most likely bigger blogsite might be affected but the funds for advertising for smaller blog may be also downsized due to the global economic meltdown..
I really hope things will get better around the world when new year is around the corner
I've not been impacted at all by the economic slowdown when it comes to blogging. So my answer is yes, smaller blogs are less effected. I have no overhead aside from myself and the time I have to dedicate to research and writing. My adsense earnings (my only source of monetization at the moment) have actually increased over the past few months. If anything I've actually managed to grow larger and stronger within my niche. Approach 4 works for me as well.