11/28/03 - 2:51 PM - Chris Lawrence in Signifying Nothing writes:
Now, there are plenty of reasons why people may be abandoning blogs. Some people may, in fact, be abandoning blogging altogether. Some have decided to take their thoughts private, so they move. Some may join group blogs. Many migrate from Blog*Spot to hosting providers. Many move from one Blog*Spot address to another—heck, Blogger even advocates the practice. Some bloggers have backup blogs hosted elsewhere. Some people—Matt Stinson, Dan Drezner—have done more than one of these. All of these “failure modes” are lumped together, because it’s simply too hard to track what’s going on.
Yes, it is hard to track. While some blogs are moving, only 1.6% of abandoned blogs surveyed had left a forwarding address. He continues:
Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics...
Better to say its a weak argument to declare blogging a failure in a study that showed the number of hosted blogs growing from 135,000 at the end of 2000 to over five million at the end of 2003.