Decline of Web 2.0

As I wrote in a prior post, about an 1870s cartographic depiction of America as a young hog, I wish the University of Michigan Map Library blog hadn't been discontinued. It isn't surprising, as Web 2.0, i.e. user contributed web content, has been in decline for years. It's difficult to believe that Technorati, once the authority for blog activity, tracked millions of blogs at one time.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?

Technorati sounded great! It was a blog search engine that was superior to Google's Blog Search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general: A new blog created every second: In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. Blog count was doubling every five months! Maybe.

Look familiar?

This was the Technorati landing page

Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was an awful lot of Internet hype.

With such amazing growth, it would seem that there would be more blogs than the entire adult population of the planet! I found a good summary of the hype timeline from this Fail-0-Pages post, Abandoned Blogs and Life Spans:

In May 2004 Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005. The Technorati figure was assailed as simply a count of blogs registered: it did not identify blogs in regular use and did not differentiate between genuine blogs and splogs (spam blogs).

Concern over U.S. vs Korea "blog gap"

I found this especially amusing, also from the same 2011 post via Fail-0-Pages, which seems mostly dormant as well:

In January 2005 the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that around 25% of all South Koreans have a blog, some US pundits lamenting a ‘blog gap’. That supposedly included 90% of those in their 20s and 79% of those under 40. In fact, the figures were for basic homepages – often little more than an email address – with the nation’s service providers, rather than blogs.

Much woo

ZDNet reported this news story in 2007, Technorati makes first major acquisition:

"Blog search site plans to use technology behind news aggregator Personal Bee to add new 'social publishing' features". This is the first major acquisition for San Francisco-based Technorati, which says it tracks more than 72 million blogs... "We are adding flexible publishing capabilities, so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the 'Live Web' in any way they like..."

By December 2008, Technorati reported that only 7.4 million (5%) of tracked blogs had been updated once in the prior 120 days. According to a June 2009 Slashdot post, Most Blogs Now Abandoned:

Technorati said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but 50,000 to 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

I recall the three most memorable terms being social, democratize, and world-class. The latter appeared a bit later, around 2012, often in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as Stanford University's Andrew Ng and his 2010 machine learning class and Sebastian Thrun's Coursera.

State of Blogosphere not so good

Technorati also produced an annual "State of the Blogosphere" report that received a lot of attention from Web 2.0 luminaries such as Robert Scoble aka The Scobleizer, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis (he live tweeted his prostate cancer surgery), Jay Rosen (journalism school professor who was a journalist for all of nine months, 30 years ago), Chris Messina (inventor of the hashtag as seen on Twitter), and Michael Arrington the TechCrunch guy.

funny i can reach with brave browser: pic.twitter.com/MuWE7MTa9H

— Buck Smith (@NelsonDaleSmith) February 23, 2024

Technorati was acquired by a programmatic advertising company in 2013. Without any prior notice, they deleted their entire blog directory. The only remnant is this sad little image. 

Unhappy face

How do blogging platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad, Medium, and Automattic survive with presumably lower revenues? 

Automattic is the owner of WordPress, Akismet, and tumblr. There is still work to be found in developing plugins for WordPress dot org sites. Some high-traffic publications use WordPress VIP as a content management system. The New York Post's online version is one example.

A few bloggers made money from the 2005 to 2010 time period. If they were paid by page views, I doubt they are now!

Who clicks on online ads?

Again, via Slashdot, Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest:

People who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged... an advertising executive in Atlanta had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate. “I did Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Do any website owners earn a living income or even hefty supplement from banner advertising? Some YouTube influencers do, but they are few. About 85% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords / AdSense according to their annual reports, so I guess the business model still works on the other side, so to speak.

Addendum One

Technorati continued to evolve. It seems to have been repurposed, replete with original logo, as a news aggregator. There isn't much advertising, and there aren't many text articles. There ARE a preponderance of grim catastrophe news videos. This was the first that I saw.

Technorati transformed - December 2023

The sources include Newser, Canadian state media CBC, and Qatari sponsored media website, Al Jazeera.

If I were even more cynical, I would assume that Technorati was a public relations organ of the Office of the President of Ukraine, given the content in the images above and below.

Lackadaisical website interest algorithms are more likely than the SBU or GRU (Ukrainian intelligence agencies). 

Addendum Two

The Fail-0-blog is a strange place. There is a good post about schadenfreude and also links to the amusing Anger Central and its more modern follow-on Musings of the Angry Webmaster.