End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over

Update Dec 29: I posted a Taxonomy of Tech Bloggers in response to the growing conversation.

That’s right. We’re at the end of an important period. The tech blogosphere as we know it, is over.

Four Trends Show the End of this Era:
Like the film industry, the Golden Era is the emergence period, when fresh innovation in a new medium is born. New techniques, revolutionary content, and different business models emerge as innovators pioneer a new medium. I first had this discussion with Chris Saad, which triggered some thinking on my end. I asked some of the foremost tech bloggers of  their opinion, and found four clear trends on why the Golden Era of Tech Blogging is over, here’s what’s shaping this change:

Trend 1: Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation
Over the last few quarters, there’s been considerable acquisitions of organized blogs (which are more akin to news sites now-a-days), most notable, we’ve seen Techcrunch, who claimed annual revenues of about 10 mil a year, being acquired by AOL.  Yet these purchases are quite common, as AOL has acquired  Engadget in 2005, and also Huffington Post in 2011.  Just two weeks ago, another larger tech blog that has enterprise focus Read Write Web was just sold to Say Media.  What typically happens when these acquisitions happen? Often the star talent, or founding team is pressured out, takes a back seat while corporate business development teams match existing advertising inventory to a new found audience forever changing the DNA of what created these startups. Lastly, acquisitions often force a conservative mindset over startups, because the purchase is focused on strengths of an asset, the mindset of ‘don’t break it’, keeps the culture to focus on the status quo. As acquisitions occur, innovation decreases.

Trend 2: Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover
Perhaps they were forced out, or maybe they saw the writing on the wall, but lately, we’ve seen a major change up in the all-star lineup of tech blogs. Just a few weeks before the acquisition of Read Write Web, the Senior Writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick separated ways (edit: he’s still writing at RWW, part time) now focused on building a product and company called Plexus Engine. Furthermore, Editor-at-Large of Mashable, Ben Parr separated ways from Mashable, yet continues to blog on his personal site. The most discussed exodus is a majority of the Techcrunch staff leaving, from founder Michael Arrington, CEO Heather Harde, top writer Sarah Lacy, and star journalist MG Siegler. Yet despite this loss, they acquired Eric Eldon, Josh Constine (both of Inside Facebook) and Sarah Perez (formerly of RWW) into the Techcrunch fold. Ben Parr himself listed out in greater detail all the people movements in the tech blogging space, there’s no doubt a shakeup occurring.  The talent shakeup is normal after several exits occur –with new stars moving on to new business models.

Trend 3: The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social
First of all, congrats if you’ve read this far! I’d assert you’re one of the few. I asked Ben Metcalfe (former MySpace and BBC) his opinion, and he says: “Attention is too fragmented now. There are just so many blogs/news websites/sources vying for your attention that you can’t read them all and build up the kind of relationship that you once could when the size of the universe was degrees of magnitude smaller.” As attention spans wane, readers want smaller, shorter bits of content, and this is why we’re seeing the growth in behaviors that social networks provide: commenting, sharing, images. I heard from Robert Scoble, who’s noticed a shift that, “…when I write something on Twitter,Facebook, Quora, or Google+ I get immediate feedback. I get thousands of views very quickly and get distribution through things like Google’s Currents or Flipboard readers. Blogging seems to have struggled in some of these areas.” As a result, content needs are smaller and shorter, as I’ve noted in the rise of inforgraphics. Even the content strategy of Mashable is changing, their new direction is more akin to digital lifestyle not just social media.

Trend 4: As space matures, business models solidify –giving room for new disruptors
This is a normal business trend in any new industry: New entrants, formalization of a new business models, and a series of business exists. Unless these authors been able to make blogging part of their business model, sustaining blogging is a challenge. Yet, let’s look at the data, in Technorati’s state of the Blogosphere for 2011 they reported that despite bloggers are publishing more, “Overall, fewer bloggers reported this year that they are making a living via their blogs.” In fact, this maturation of the tech blogosphere is a aligned to a normal cycle of industry maturing, emergence, many fail, some develop disruptive business models, and some exit. I heard from father of the Social Media Club, Chris Heuer who told me that “Blogging, and Social Media broadly, is past adolescence and into young adulthood, maybe even getting ready to go off to college. Going by our early measure of where are we compared to the dotcom era, I’d say we are about 2000, but without the irrational exuberance.” I agree with Chris and to illustrate this point, I’ve noticed that long gone is the scrappy new media entrepreneurs like Arrington who built a decent sized empire, cashed out, and moved on to to a traditional industry like venture capital.

The Future: A New Era to Emerge
Tech blogging isn’t dying, it’s evolving. This is a normal part of any industry, and here’s what tech bloggers themselves told me:

An opportunity for new stars to emerge
Now, with the major talent turnover, there’s an opportunity for a new media model to emerge, and along with it new stars: “The tech journalism space has changed considerably in the last few months, but there are new stars that are taking up the roles that the old guard have left behind. The voices, opinions and personalities that define tech are changing. Perhaps fresh minds and ideas are exactly what the tech media world needs.”–Ben Parr

Yet, the rise of personal brands will be harder
Now that the ecosystem is entrenched with corporate owners and mature advertising programs, there will be less room for innovation and new stars to emerge.  Why? PR firms know who the established players are, and will continue forge alliances in page views for exclusives.  “Take for example that many of the “big blogs” don’t even link to the primary sources of their posts because they don’t want to send the traffic off-site. How can anyone get discovered if those who have the attention won’t share it?”  –Ben Metcalfe

New models to emerge, long form content not the only way
Bloggers themselves know that relying on a single tool isn’t effective, they need a series of tools to use; “blogging isn’t dead. it may have gotten a LOT more social, and it may be less frequent now for those of us who also use twitter / facebook / tumbler / youtube for other distribution efforts, but the overall impact from these platforms together is BIGGER than ever before (and i maintain, also EASIER than ever before if you build it right).” -Dave McClure, who, on a related note, is also on a Blogging Hiatus.

Will mix new forms of media
Yet these top bloggers all agree that a new form of media mix will emerge; “Blogging isn’t dead and still a fantastic tool, there is room for new players and it’s still the best way to build your personal brand IMO. I’m actually planning to go back to blogging much more myself and just updated the template of loiclemeur.com. Also, what is blogging? Publishing a video with your thoughts on YouTube is blogging and that is extremely powerful, each time I do itI get a good audience, even if the video quality is crappy. A video can be much more like original blogging as you can take the time to express yourself in longer form.” –Loic Lemeur, tech blogger, entrepreneur, LeWeb host. Yet, he’s not the only one, Francine Hardaway, VC blogger says “Blogging is a tool, like social media. This year’s new tool will be personal video, which is long overdue.” who also nods to video usage.

Final Thoughts:
Despite the Golden Era of Tech blogging to be over, we should expect a new format, new type of content and new pioneers to emerge, forever changing the new media and tech reporting space. I for one, look forward to it and will embrace it, both out of necessity, and with passion.

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225 Replies to “End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over”

  1. Very good points here. At the same time, blogging as a way to publish new insights will continue to penetrate some populations (such as scientists) who are just now coming to the table.

  2. Personally i think there is too much focus on blogs making money through advertising… securing premium content and offering it at a price is my vision of a 2016 web and obviously mobile and social are going to be the catalysts for the success and propagation of that idea/content delivery method.

    Love your stuff Jeremiah!  Saw you and McClure at the Arizona Entrepreneurship conference.  Great stuff!

  3. Hey Jeremiah,

    I’d say it’s less the “end of an era” and more the beginning of a new phase.  

    In the past 6 months, Mashable made changes that dramatically accelerated our growth — we’re now serving 25 million monthly unique visitors, growing traffic at a faster rate than ever before.  We’ve beaten our own traffic records every month for the past 6 months.

    Revenue is up 4x from Jan 2011 to Dec 2011.  We’re up to 60 staff and expect to accelerate our hiring in 2012.  It’s a radically different organization with a much steeper growth curve than blogs experienced – it’s more like a fully-fledged media company.

    I think the important thing — and something that you spin as a negative here — is that change is essential to unlock new growth.  The fact that organizations change shouldn’t be seen as a negative — in our case, adapting to the new environment has led to the most successful phase in our company’s short history.  

    I agree that new forms of media are becoming dominant — including news consumption through social media — but for us this is a huge win, since more social media use means our stories reach a wider audience.  

    The future may indeed be a time when new stars can shine, but equally it’s an opportunity for businesses like ours — who are unafraid of adapting to the new environment — to enter a new, faster phase of growth.  We think our golden age is yet to come.

  4. Great post, thought provoking. I sense this could be the end of the beginning for the pioneers of self-publishing – the Techcrunch crowd moving on from their own platform to new pastures. Meanwhile blogging goes mainstream for the majority of businesses, outside the hot-house of technology sector. Remember the basics – decide on your objective and your audience. Then choose your channel and craft the message to achieve the outcomes. Content marketing, with purpose.

  5. Nice article, it seems like social posts are the gateway to more in depth information- and blogs will remain the place for this info. Besides, a lot of tech blogs help consumers decide on tech purchases and remain top in search results. I know I would be disappointed if I was looking for info on a new gadget and I had to wade through a bunch of random posts, so I don’t think that will change.

  6. Pete, I’ve been fascinated to see how Mashable combines paid content with social. We conducted a review of your site over a year ago. We saw about 30 paid writers, and 20-30 posts a day. With 10% of your posts coming from columnists content. I suggested, the paid writers gave you flexibility in targeting real time, and keyword news. While the columnists gave you social content, the columnist articles were more valuable than the paid journo articles. 1) Free 2) Social content from people who acted as their own publicity agents for each article published in Mashable, they shared, blogged and help get you the links and social influence without having to pay anyone. Plus you folks have been working on syndication. I’m curious about your numbers now. What percentage of your content is paid compared to community generated? How many community managers do you have who encourage submissions?

  7. I’m glad you can explain the result of such a high growth (while excluding the partnership with CNN as a huge reason). Can you also explain the loss of value in the articles. I’ve talked with a handful of individuals in the NYC area and other major metropolitans across the country and the consensus was the same – Mashable is no longer a reliable source. How will you change that moving forward into 2012?

  8. I’m glad you can explain the result of such a high growth (while excluding the partnership with CNN as a huge reason). Can you also explain the loss of value in the articles. I’ve talked with a handful of individuals in the NYC area and other major metropolitans across the country and the consensus was the same – Mashable is no longer a reliable source. How will you change that moving forward into 2012?

  9. I don’t know about a Golden Era as much as an evolution in how blogging has moved from an edge media to Media companies in their own right as Pete mentioned.  However, what I think is just as interesting; and also indicative of the changing landscape of media is Larger Media outlets recognizing the emergence of blogging and social media as sources of information as well as channels for information consumption. 
    This is echoed in not only acquisitions, but in the adoption of social media within the larger players, CNN being the first.  Further you can look at the Arab spring and how blogging and social media has almost been a replacement for traditional media.
    In addition, the increase of mobile devices for creating and consuming media is still accelerating.
    I think its hard to call this a Golden Era, instead, I would call it a coming of age.  The real interesting times and their impacts on Media, global politics and life in general is yet to be fully felt.

  10. John, Not sure what you’re talking about?  All the writers — including contributors — are paid.  Last month we added limited curation from partners in areas where we lack expertise — usually up to 4 or 5 articles per day. 

    Patrick, Content partnerships are not a major source of growth hence not mentioned.  They don’t even make it into our top 10 referrers.  Our core readership tells us that relevancy and quality are increasing.  I do believe that “quality” is a personal metric and not a universal one, however — what one person finds useful, another may not.  It’s very possible that the people you speak to aren’t part of our target audience, and that’s fine with us.

    But given the fact that the vast majority of our content is produced in house by paid journalists, we do at least rank high on one measure of quality — our content is very expensive to produce.

    Loic, We’re going after high value content since that carries the furthest across the web.  If you check in your reader stats, you’ll see Mashable publishes fewer articles than most comparable sites — they just get shared a lot more.  These articles might not be highly relevant to you (ie. what you define as a personal metric of “quality”), since you live in Silicon Valley, but that’s exactly why Mashable outgrew everyone else — because we cover tech in a way that makes it relevant to a highly influential online audience, especially those outside the valley.

  11. I dream and stand in, enough of the chit chat/not to belittle it cause I love information.  They have built the tools.  Yeah I love start ups and Venture Capital, though it all scares me at times.  Fred Wilson said it at a Paley Center talk this year, the suits were asking where do we invest our money, he said, that’s nice but it’s time for a revolution if things are going to last/work out.

    Let’s Cause a Revolution.  So that when November comes, We caused the Election, and Government didn’t know what hit them.  And, Education & Youth, Food, ETC. were blown away by the leaders who created the new Armies.  The Protesters are the Greed thieves, the Big BRAND Corporations, and politico’s that want to Own and Control.  The Time Cover 2012 will the The Human Being Who Cares and Loves You. SOPA for instance – Shervin & Sean communicated this is the year of Social Media in Campaigning, an official can be elected without money.  Of course, Big Finance Corporation want to Protest. We Have Big VOICE.  WE are the One that Make the Change Beautifully, Warrior Like, with Passion & Heart.  Imagine the Possibilities. And I See it happening Now.

    I don’t claim to know it all or have it exactly right, I have a strong sense and intuition, And, really interested to hear if this is in others listening.

  12. Good article.  I couldn’t agree more that people are so overwhelmed with all the blogging out there and, combined with their busy lives, they have to be super-interested in the content to take the time to read it.  It’s much easier to take in shorter bits and pieces of information or to watch a short video. 

  13. Hey Pete, it’s a fact that if your audience grows as well as your revenue it’s definitely proving success, don’t get me wrong, congrats for that as a business.

  14. Pete, are you saying you have no columnists who contribute content on a free basis? Or did you once have that arrangement? I thought you had about 5-10% of your content from free contributors but the majority from Paid journalists.

  15. Hi Pete, I just checked in with one of your contributing writers and he told me he wasn’t paid, and that no one is paid unless they are on staff. Did you understand my question. I meant the columnists not the staff writers.

  16. What’s up with these comments?  They’re grammatical, spelled properly, and with coherent thoughts.  Does Jeremiah grammar and spell check each comment?  

    As an interested observer in the tech scene, tech blogs provide me with accessible information and understanding.  This helped me understand how the sites I follow are evolving and why.  Thanks.

  17. Exactly, like SAI, Bostinno and many other “tech” blogs that now write about sports, celebs, etc. I worked on Corante, which was the *first* blog network back in the day. That was uber-quality from very smart people posting maybe once a day. Today, the junk that gets published from the so called Super-blogs is mostly crap.

    THANK GOD FOR TECHMEME! (now who’s going to do Gabe one better?)

  18. Some of it is good crap ;-), but I feel thats the general sentiment we all share, right? We want quality, publishers will do whatever it takes (linkbait, grrr!) to get eyeballs.

  19. Yes, ,I agree to the premise of this article. Tech Blogging isn’t dying. It’s changing. It’s Evolving…

  20. Each year the family and I gather round the fire to revisit the tech blogs of yesteryear. We weep, we laugh, we rejoice and marvel at these timeless classics. And how it saddens me to hear this golden age is over. Whither the tech blogs of yesteryear? Gather ye insular gossipy meaningless blog posts while ye may, for the time is still a-flying.

  21. Great Post! When you say the golden age of tech blog is over, do you mean BLOGGING in general? I dont think blogging will disappear. The very simple fact that people are sharing, and people are communicating, blogs will drive discussion. Look at it: blogging has given information as social character, in blogging we got the social life of information…twitter, facebook just extended it to the larger online community. 

    As Pete say, without the content on mashable i wonder what people will exchange and talk. Now on the other side, we don’t follow each other – whatever you say on twitter for example, I dont get as we are not related (6 degrees if we want to call it). But by making a simple search, I came across your blog, read an interesting post, read those of the big guys further down and am leaving a comment. 

    Just the fact of reading constructive comments within this post makes blogging strong at the first place. The interaction starts from here. The new media allows us to extend it. Another example is the following: there are also millions of people who are neither on facebook or twitter  and if they are, then they are there for friends and family. but they still read the original directly, print and participate in comments. In this sense, blogging won’t disappear. it might evolve. But then interaction with information has always evolved. I for one still resist the thought that social media with its shorter bits of content will push blogging to the exit. The short bits of content serve as a teaser to click and read. Besides quotations, I dont know anyone who resist clicking on the mashable short url following a title-news submitted

  22. Hi Jeremiah, I’m joigning the conversation a bit late… However I have some questions: I agree with the fact that the phenomenon is evolving but for internal blogs I see there still is some space especially when you’re talking about big companies where employees do not have access to internal social media platforms. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts. Sagz

  23. Only bloggers think that there was a golden age of blogging. Anyone not caught up in this IT tech hype or internet blogging doesn’t think much of it. It’s not real journalism or reporting, just a bunch of people sounding off. Just like I am doing here. No real in depth thought. People just doing what is easy with minimal work.

  24. This is just because every newbie wants the easiest way to come in blogging and tech blogging is the easiest way to come in blogging !!
    Hope people stop copying others and start and implement their own ideas

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