Is Microblogging A Real Threat To Blogging?

Posted By: dotCOMreport Editor

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Not long ago, predictions that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon displace their reign at the top, were common. Twitter was believed to mean the end for blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one thought at a time rather than entire articles.

Nevertheless, blogs are doing fine today, while Twitter’s growth has somewhat leveled out. The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S. since last summer is now finally hitting its worldwide visitor growth as well.

ComScore estimated that Twitter had 58.3 million unique visitors worldwide, a drop from 58.4 million in the previous month. Meanwhile, WordPress  improved by 10 million unique visitors to end the month at 151.8 million—this is after going essentially nowhere the preceding four months.

Needless to say, WordPress is being used as a proxy for all blogging here. Blogger could have just as easily been used and is, in fact, bigger than WordPress with 291.7 million visitors worldwide. Blogger also saw a similar holding pattern, with a huge sudden jump of 18.2 million visitors.

This begs the question: “Is blogging back, while microblogging is on the skids?” A one-month spike in the popularity of blogs doesn’t enlighten you too much of anything, but in any case it’s not the right question to ask. Blogging never actually went away, and was in fact helped by Twitter, which is becoming the favored feed reader for many people (thanks to services like Twitterfeed).

And don’t expect microblogging to be ruled irrelevant. Twitter has rolled out improvements to its site such as Lists and the Retweet button. Once geolocation features kick in, Twitter’s growth could come back with a vengeance.

Posted In » Blogging - Web 2.0 - Social Media
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