How Blogs Evolved Toward Marketing

 

Back in 1997, the so called “weblogs” were born as informative websites based on a single subject. At that time, the main purpose of blogs was to create interaction between people. And the basics “comment on this post” or “send a message to” were the keys to do it.

Most people started blogging to share personal lives with others, making blogs virtual diaries run by individuals. However, writing blogs soon became a means for institutions and politicians to disseminate information and form opinions.

When the blog-mania exploded, many newspapers went into bankruptcy or rapidly moved from the newsstand to the online platform. The fact is, that when it comes to spreading information quickly, blogs are faster, because they push messages directly to the readers and do not need to pull them.

At the same time, people are keen on searching information on the internet rather than buying a newspaper. It is too time consuming these days.

The New Era of Blogs

In 2008, believe it or not, every second a blog was created. In short, we are talking about 31,536,000 new blogs that year alone. A figure that is probably hard to read and digest.

If we look at the present, with more than 500 million blogs existing on the internet and their unstoppable rise, old school weblogs can be considered the primordial form of social networks. Same aim: creating content in order to build social relations.

As a matter of fact, even Facebook and Twitter emerged as micro-communities to develop people’s contact. This is why we now live in the blogosphere, where all websites are interconnected and socially networked.

The thing is that nowadays blogs are not only used for sharing ideas or personal experiences. This form of blogging has been surpassed by online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. 

In fact, internet marketers pay close attention to daily trends in the blogosphere and the commercialisation of blogs. Not only, the increase in popularity has lead to the creation of professionally edited multi-author blogs in order to increase the web traffic.

Indeed, today clicking generates money, and therefore, the more we click, the more the cash is flowing.

 

One might well wonder how few blogs become viral and many others don’t. Blogrolls, to begin with, are lists of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them, usually in a sidebar list. Alternatively, the quickest way to increase popularity is through permalinks, which are permanent URLs of a specific website, static from the first publication to the latest.

It remains the case that nowadays blogs have become a model of marketing communication from B2C, leading to a new and controversial development. Among the forms of advertising on blogs, the most contested are the sponsored posts, which give feedback and contain a link back to the site.

This is how blogs are working now and, as a result, consumer-generated advertising in blogs brings a lack of credibility to the blogosphere. At this point, are blogs going to end up like newspaper? Surely not for now, as far as our endless exploitation of the world wide web continues.

But as Barack Obama said about the blogging trends: “If the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, then what you will end up getting people is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding”.