Is Blogging Dead In 2024?

Is blogging dead? A question that arises year after year – with the same answer of ‘no’ every time. However, this time it’s different. With the prominence of AI, the March 2024 Core Update from Google, and trends in content consumption shifting elsewhere, blogging could actually be dead this time.

I have been blogging for several years now, with numerous blogs in different niches; some are outsourced, some fully AI, and some human-written by me (this one). So I have been around the block enough to see the highs and lows of blogging. Though, I have never considered blogging to be ‘dead’, I have a different take on it in 2024…

Current State of Blogging

As of 2024, the blogging landscape continues to thrive despite the challenges posed by AI and video content (TikTok). Blogging remains an essential component of content marketing strategies for businesses, for example, 89% of B2B marketers create short articles and blog posts. (Content Marketing Institute). Blogging also remains a revenue-earning asset for individuals.

Blogging Popularity and Consumption

There are over 600 million active blogs across the internet with over 7.5 million blog posts published daily. Not only is that a lot of content, but 77 % of internet users actually read blogs too. In addition, when looking at the page types that rank among the top 5 in the SERPs, blogs take the lead by far.

The most popular blogging platforms include:

Tumblr (495 Million Blogs)
WordPress (60 Million Blogs)
Medium (60 Million Blogs)
Wix (2 Million)

In one survey, 52% of people wanted to see more blog posts and 43% wanted to see more video content from marketers. Indicating that the demand for video content has not killed off blogging yet.

Blog Content & Formats

The blogging world has seen an increase in the average length of posts, with many successful blogs featuring articles that exceed 2,000 words, aiming for the optimal range of 2,250 to 2,500 words for enhanced engagement and SEO performance. (DemandSage). Despite this trend towards longer content, most readers prefer posts under 1,000 words.

How-to articles still remain the most popular blog content format according to bloggers, with news and trends following far behind and roundup posts being the least popular.

Blog Niches

Based on a study in 2023, the top 3 new blogs that were created focused on the lifestyle, travel, and food niches – in that order. In addition, the most profitable blog niches are food and personal finance blogs, which make around $9K per month on average, although the personal finance niche is incredibly difficult to find success in – especially as a new blogger.

In terms of which niche brings the most traffic, the top 3 still apply but in a different order. The food niche has over 40% of blogs with 50,000 sessions/mo., the lifestyle niche has over 10%, and the travel niche hovers around the 10% mark.

Business Blogging

According to HubSpot, companies that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t. Having implemented blogs and content strategies for companies, I have not only seen an increase in traffic but also an increase in leads. For example, DemandSage states that businesses that publish 16 or more blog posts a month are likely to generate 4.5 times as many leads compared to those that don’t publish as often.

For content marketers, such as myself, 89% say blog content is a top priority. (Siege Media). Additionally, HubSpot found that many business bloggers argue that listicles are the most popular blog post format – this is generally any blog that has a list of reasons, points, or steps.

Personal Blogging

Personal blogging is a popular method in the ‘make money online’ and ‘passive income’ space (even though it’s technically not passive). As per GlassDoor, in the US, bloggers can earn up to $84,000 a year. Additionally, Semrush found that bloggers who make between $7,500 and $25,000 per month get 42.2% of their revenue through affiliate marketing. Showing that it’s still a lucrative business to get into.

Based on the latest data I could find, there are over 31 million bloggers in the USA alone. However, I want to break down this data:

From 2014 to 2015: A 0.9 million Increase
From 2015 to 2016: A 0.8 million Increase
From 2016 to 2017: A 0.9 million Increase
From 2017 to 2018: A 0.6 million Increase
From 2018 to 2019: A 0.6 million Increase
From 2019 to 2020: A 0.5 million Increase

Using a linear regression model, I predicted the date for the following 8 years (2021 to 2028). Although we are in 2024, the chart has not been updated at its source so the previous 3 years have been estimated too:

2021: Increase of approximately 0.34 million
2022: Increase of approximately 0.26 million
2023: Increase of approximately 0.18 million
2024: Increase of approximately 0.10 million
2025: Increase of approximately 0.01 million
2026: Decrease of approximately 0.07 million
2027: Decrease of approximately 0.15 million
2028: Decrease of approximately 0.24 million

The model predicts that the increase will continue to decrease and eventually turn into a decrease in the total number after 2025. This could indicate a saturation or decline phase in the number of bloggers in the USA. I think this number will drop considerably in a sooner timeframe based on recent movements in the blogging world.

Of course – this is just a prediction and an equation, it could be incorrect.

Is Blogging Dead?

In my opinion, blogging is dead for new starters and early-stage blogs that are going after organic traffic only, however, blogging is just fine for business blogs and already-established, reputable blogs. The main reason I believe it’s dead for new starters and beginner blogs is that Google, since the March Core Update, has made it incredibly difficult for sites to rank organically – which I will cover further down.

Then there’s artificial intelligence (AI) which has taken the content marketing world by storm in the past 3 years. This has caused an influx of new blogs, more posts, and awful content on the web – increasing competition.

When I say that blogging is dead, it’s a generalization. If you are willing to invest the time, money, and resources into making it work it’s possible. But it’s not as easy as it was 5 – 10 years ago. It has become incredibly hard to establish a blog by itself relying on organic traffic through SEO – There are many reasons a blog isn’t getting traffic, without the support of other content and traffic generation.

Give Your Thoughts

Let me know whether you think blogging is dead in this poll below:

That’s why my advice is the following:

Don’t rely on organic traffic from search engines.

Search engines are unpredictable, one algorithm change and you could lose everything overnight. Support marketing efforts with SEO for organic traffic, don’t rely on it.

Support content with video, social media, forums, podcasts, or other media to drive traffic.

For new blogs, don’t focus only on writing and publishing content. Build a social media audience, use other content-sharing platforms (Medium) to build an audience, create YouTube videos to capture an audience, create or guest on podcasts, and do anything you can to build an audience.

Invest more time into link-building.

Typically, there are percentages thrown around like 70% of the time should be promoting a blog while 30% should be writing it. In the beginning, I say the following:

– 50% promoting
– 10% writing
– 20% building an audience elsewhere
– 20% building backlinks.

Backlinks are the most prominent ranking factor and you won’t get anywhere without them, especially in the beginning. So investing hours into creating content but not backlinks – you will get no organic traffic and be wasting your time.

Understand that it’s going to take a long time to see results.

It has always been said that blogging takes time and it’s not easy, but for newcomers in this day and age, I say that it takes double if not triple the time. Unless you take shortcuts such as throwing money at paid ads or you have a large audience already.

Don’t try to compete with the monopolies who have money.

Once a blog becomes established, it generally gets acquired by a larger company. These companies have billions behind them and enable the blogs to ramp up production and explode in popularity. Unfortunately for the little guys – this means they dominate search engine results. Take a look at the overview from Detailed covering the 16 companies that dominate Google Search Results:

Then think about how many of these smaller sites you see when searching for queries in Goole. They cover almost every major query and have thousands of backlinks with high authority – you will never be able to compete with this.

Invest in building an audience (email list) to offset traffic losses.

As I mentioned, you need to safeguard your organic traffic with audience building. This could be a social following, an email subscriber list, Patreon, followers, or any method that allows a user to see updates from your blog. Not only is this to cover organic traffic losses, but it’s also to get traffic when you just start out.

Challenges in Blogging

From my experience, these are some of the blogging challenges that should be considered:

Google’s Core Updates

Google updates its algorithm hundreds of times per year and applies Core Updates a couple of times per year. These updates tweak or severely alter how Google reads websites and where it ranks them. For some sites it increases positioning and traffic, for some, it drops, and for some, it remains the same. However, for many blogs, these fluctuations cause a loss of revenue and could jeopardize running and maintaining their sites.

Not to mention that it’s unpredictable – it could happen overnight. Of course, Google does provide documentation and warnings in advance, but I have still seen sites get hit that have prepared for the updates.

Then there’s the March 2024 Helpful Content update, which decimated over 40% of sites. With Google dishing out manual penalties and removing sites completely from the SERPs. 3 of my sites also got hit, including this one.

Upon speaking with some Google experts, I was told that backlinks, new websites, and AI content are some of the main reasons for not ranking: which reinforces my point before – new websites can’t do anything until they get backlinks and build their E-E-A-T, meaning the least amount of focus should be on creating content.

The point is, that this is one of the primary challenges of blogging. That’s why I recommend that if you are new or just starting a blog, focus more on building authority and backlinks over anything else – but equally, never rely on Google as a traffic source.

High Competition and Saturation

There’s no denying that blogging is competitive, especially considering that there are over 2 million blog posts published daily and around 77 million comments per month on blog posts. However, since the explosion in popularity of ChatGPT, these numbers would have skyrocketed. This means even more competition and even more saturation in niches.

The tactic for smaller blogs, for some time, has been to target smaller niches – but even those are becoming saturated. Making more difficult and challenging for new blogs to get into the game. I still recommend choosing a less competitive niche if you are starting a blog with limited resources – that doesn’t mean choosing something you don’t like, it means narrowing down the topics you cover (Travel > becomes > Budget Travel for Over 60s).

Time and Resource Investment

This has always been a challenge for bloggers and most don’t actually realize how much investment is needed to make a blog successful. These are some of the factors to consider:

Writing 1-4 blog posts per week.
Research (keywords, competitors, content ideas)
Planning the content and when to publish.
Maintaining the website and fixing any technical issues.
Updating existing content regularly (the more you have the more you have to update)
Marketing and promoting your blog.
Managing social accounts for the blog.
Repurposing content into other formats to drive traffic.
Building backlinks (guest posting, outreach etc.)
Collaborating with other bloggers/industry experts to build your audience
Email marketing
Joining/adding/updating affiliate links and partnerships
Creating custom images/infographics etc.

I could go on, but the point is, that blogging has become increasingly difficult and one of the main challenges is for people who want to it as a ‘side hustle’. The time requirement is extensive and thinking you can write a couple of blogs on the side – will not work.

Equally, for businesses, managing this becomes a full-time responsibility and they have to have the resources available to ensure it’s possible.

If it was that easy – everyone would be doing it!

High SEO Standards

SEO has evolved over the years and while some may argue it has become easier, I actually think the opposite. There is a much higher standard that Google expects with content now, and it’s not just the content, it’s also the user experience you provide on your site and the expertise and authority you display as a company or person. This has been around for some time, however, with the March update, the algorithms have been tweaked to focus on this more heavily in a bid to remove spam and the influx of poor-quality AI content.

Of course, it’s not going to be easy to manage SEO standards, that’s why it’s a standalone profession, but the point is that it’s challenging for those running blogs without outsourcing to a company to manage or having extra support.

Initially, I recommend focusing on the basics of SEO and the most prominent ranking factors – the rest can be addressed later. Don’t get too caught up in every single little detail as you will end up wasting time.

Burnout and Consistency

Unfortunately, the way digital platforms work in 2024 is to force users to update content more and more often in order to drive traffic and boost revenues for big corporations – this is especially true for social media. This means that algorithms favor pages, profiles, and sites, that publish content on a regular consistent schedule – which are then pushed to users.

When you publish a blog post, Google is able to see that the site is updated and provides fresh content – which is part of providing a good user experience. So if you went 4 months without posting, it’s likely your site could hit some ranking trouble with new posts after that time frame.

This pressure to keep on top of everything regularly can cause burnout and can also drive people to quit blogging altogether. That’s why it helps to know what you’re getting into as I mentioned above.

My advice would be to stay organized and even if your posts are incomplete (when starting out) still publish them. For example, if you are missing an image or something small – not if it has sections missing.

Generating Traffic

This isn’t exactly something new, one of the primary challenges for marketers is getting traffic – but there are solutions out there. However, for blogging, generating traffic can be more challenging when it comes to the organic side of things. SEO can take time to implement and be effective, social media and email marketing require an audience to be built, and other content platforms require the same – I would actually say it’s more time-consuming than challenging, but both apply.

For business blogs it’s a little different, especially if the site already has an audience and authority – this would make it easier to generate traffic initially, but there would still be challenges that exist when traffic needs increasing.

The important note for this challenge is to focus on building an audience that can be leveraged for traffic when needed – such as an email list.

Finding a Niche

Finding and selecting a niche is another key blogging challenge. Too broad and you will never be able to compete with the other blogs out there – too niche and you will struggle for content and an audience. Following Google’s heavy focus on E-E-A-T, when choosing a niche, it should be something you have expertise in and also something you are passionate about. The challenge lies in identifying a niche that’s competitive enough to be successful, but not too competitive where you will never stand a chance.

This will involve heavy research in the beginning in order to understand the keyword opportunities, audiences of competition, content opportunities, and other factors. It’s important to make sure that you consider every angle before jumping into a topic.

I recommend focusing a large portion of your time on researching and understanding the blogging landscape before getting started.

Opportunities in Blogging

Not everything in blogging has to be a challenge, it’s important to understand that there are also opportunities available, even if they only apply to established blogs or content marketers:

AI Content

Although fully generated – unedited AI content is a bad idea, using AI to support research, content creation, and formatting can be a huge time-saver. AI can assist in creating a content planner, stimulating content ideas, structuring your posts, and taking the heavy lifting away from managing a blog.

This presents an opportunity to either increase content production or support existing tasks. Personally, I don’t use AI with this blog (except for the thumbnail images) but I use it to support some of the menial and repetitive tasks.

Niche Expertise and Authority Building

Despite my labelling this as a challenge, it could actually be an opportunity depending on how you look at it. Finding the perfect niche can help bloggers establish authority and a dedicated audience, making their content more valuable and sought after. For example, if there’s no one covering the niche you are in, it’s an open podium for you to take the number one spot and be the authority – hence reducing many of the challenges above.

Take the authority side of things, if you are a well-established industry expert in, let’s say, quantum computing, with features in podcasts, videos, and articles, and your name covered in many places – you will find it easier to establish that authority through your blog if done correctly. This will help if there are other competing blogs that might be ranking without the level of expertise you have.

Utilizing Other Media

With the vast number of content types and platforms out there, an opportunity that exists in blogging is to create other forms of media. Granted – it doesn’t really count as blogging then, but if you are using additional media types to drive users to your blog and bolster the blog content then it’s worth doing.

For example, you could turn a blog post into a video and post it on YouTube: not only could you get traffic from YouTube, but you also create a better experience on your blog post and help with SEO by having video content.

Another example is a podcast. You could repurpose blog posts into a podcast with the goal of bringing audio listeners to your blog. Likewise, you can also embed the podcast into your blog post too, to satisfy regular readers.

Moving an audience from one platform to another isn’t easy, but if you can get a small portion of those audiences, it will help your blog.

If you already have an audience on social media, great. If not, it’s easier to build a social media following than traffic to a blog – in my opinion. As organic traffic is becoming more difficult for newer/smaller blogs, there is an opportunity to focus on social media channels instead (although this should be an additional part of your blogging strategy anyway).

You can leverage this social following as traffic to your blog posts and also to increase your audience through social shares. This can work well on Facebook, X, and Threads, but it can also work on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest – if the content is tailored to the platform and there are effective strategies to drive traffic from the platform to the blog.

There is also the opportunity to contribute on forums such as Reddit and Quora. Reddit for example has a partnership with Google and its content is appearing in the top results for thousands of search queries in a bid to provide helpful, first-person accounts for the user. You could use this as an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and experience in your niche by regularly interacting with communities and getting your name out there – it will help your blog in the long run.

Finally, every platform you create and the audience you build is an asset, especially if you ever decide to sell your blog in the future. Accompanying accounts with engaged audiences will drive the value up!

My Final Thoughts – The Future of Blogging

I think the next 2 years are going to shape the future of blogging – more for independent bloggers rather than business blogs. The Google Core Update in March has impacted the blogging world heavily and beyond recovery for some, I think the next 6 months will show the true impact and how many blogs can regain rankings. While blogging is not all about Google and organic traffic – it’s a huge part of it, with this becoming more difficult, it’s going to impact new blogs getting started, how content marketers think, and how businesses approach blogging.