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As the medium has become more popular, money has flowed in. And while no one would deny that blogging has lowered the barriers to self-publication by average citizens, the free-wheeling fraternal spirit of blogging has become increasingly subject to market disciplines. As a result, as Web critic Nicholas Carr told me, blogging has evolved to become “a lot more like a traditional mass medium.”
The data would seem to back this up. First, a clear, stable, class at the top has emerged. An examination of the Technorati rankings for recent years reveals that turnover among the top 50 blogs has become increasingly rare. Even as the total number of blogs has swelled to 133 million from 27 million in 2006, the top 50 have remained relatively static. On March 15, 2006, 30 blogs out of the top 50 were new to the list, never having appeared at the top in any previous year; last month, that number was down to 18. Even the new entrants are no mom-and-pop shops: National Review, Entertainment Weekly and Politico are among the owners, and one of the few independent upstarts, Seeking Alpha, is backed by venture capital. The bulk of the list consists of familiar names, many of whom were among the first to emerge on the Web—from Andrew Sullivan, now of the Atlantic, to the Daily Kos and Boing Boing.
Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL. And many blogs that began as solo operations are developing into full-fledged publications. Josh Marshall’s newsgathering war horse, the Talking Points Memo, has plans to expand its staff of 11 to a full 60. (If another quixotic Josh Marshall came along, Talking Points Memo would be among the media titans he would have to dethrone.) TechCrunch, founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, now has a staff of more than 20. There are only a handful of self-employed solo writers left among the top fifty, and these include standout talents such as Michelle Malkin, Perez Hilton, and Seth Godin.
An immense proportion of the online readership—roughly 42% of all blog traffic—flows to the top 50 blogs. Their dominance of the market is reinforced by the dynamics of the Web itself: users hunting for blogs typically end up directed by search engines to the same group of highly-linked, already popular sites. What’s more, even deliberate attempts to go off the beaten path aren’t likely to lead out of the conglomerate world: the most lucrative niche categories have attracted dominant brands, too, with AOL alone owning 27 of the top 100 blogs, in categories ranging from automobiles, to free software, to independent film and pop culture. The big brands have become so powerful that it’s little wonder that 94 percent of the blogs counted in Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report have been shuttered and abandoned.
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