How long does it take for one to abandon their blogs? Or better yet, how long of a “vacation” do they take away from their blogs before they consider coming back? Well, the fact that many people tend to give up because they don’t see instant results, or it simply isn’t what they expected, those sites are just left there for dead.
But I decided to do my own hands on experiment to see how many blogs have been “abandoned till this very day” or “abandoned at some point, then continued months later.”
What I did was do random searches for blogs (Wordpress and Blogger) using their “next blog” feature. I broke it down into a couple various categories:
- Blogs that are less than a month old,
- Blogs that have not been updated for over a month,
- Blogs that are now active but have taken at least a month off at some point
- And blogs that are currently active that is two months or older
Now I know this excludes a lot of blogs but this was just a test, and I only got a chance to go through 209 random blogs.
So, out of the 209 total blogs that I randomly went through, a majority of the blogs were less than a month old; to be exact, there were 95 total. But with that number, the real question should be “how long are those blogs are going last before they become ‘dead’ or inactive?”
The blogs that have not been updated for over a month was 16, and blogs that have been inactive more than two months were 9.
Then there were 28 out of the 209 blogs that are now active, but at some point of time they were inactive for at least a month or more. A majority of them took breaks from anywhere between 2 to 6 months before eventually coming back.
The remaining 70 I came across were older than two months, had updated and active posts and did not have any breaks longer than a few weeks at any point of time.
Honestly, I feel the “abandoned” blog numbers were a little lower than what I had expected. But more than likely, there is a higher percentage overall than the stats I got strictly from the 209 blogs I ran across from the “next blog” feature on both Wordpress and Blogger.
The chances of you running into an “abandoned” blog are higher now and I believe it will just continue to grow.
On the other hand, there are blogs that haven’t been updated for months but they still rack up a pretty good chunk of change. Obviously, people still go to them and click on the ads or whatever.
But those are pretty rare, aren’t they?
Abandoned Blogs
Wordpress
Blogger
Experiment
Random Posts
You bring forth some amazing stats and I am sure there will be more.
I’ll bet that not everyone knew they connect with Next Blog from Wordpres..
Amusing feature that and I also got lots of repeat site showing up
Thanks for the information.
Wendy
http://wensonlinebusiness.wordpress.com/
It would be interesting to see just how many blogs are abandoned, I myself have stopped and started in the post on a site of mine which is currently down.
A couple of things I think affected my decision to stop updating my blog was lack of ideas for content in the niche I was working on and not giving myself enough allocated time to update it. In the end I decided to just go with my instincts and create a personal blog.
That’s it; now I’m abandoning my blog.
When I started out blogging, I wanted to run multiple blogs covering a variety of subjects. Like four or five or even six. then I realized how hard it was managing just three, and I dumped two, kept one, and now I’ve made a second.
Wendy - Yeah, I noticed the “next” feature on both Blogger and Wordpress shows repeats. I did my best to not count them twice in my results.
Dcrad - Honestly, you should just do what you know and what you feel comfortable with. When it comes down to it, if you be yourself, you’ll NEVER run out of things to write about.
Stan - Can I have your abandoned blog?
C-squared - Honestly, I thought I could handle three blogs but in reality, it’s hard UNLESS I’m doing it full-time and didn’t have a day job. But once I start making more money, I can quit my day job and devote more time into these things too.
Jay
DatMoney.com
DatCurious.com
Maybe there’s a reason why people abandon their blogs.. Maybe they don’t know how to start and find it hard to keep up, maybe they though that making money online was easy…
Anyway, it’s good to know how many abandon blogs are out there, but I actually want to know the reason for that!
my dear friend jay
you really inspired me to post this article today check it out http://midomssh.rab7net.org/2008/01/25/money-making-articles-are-you-posting-for-money
i had to answer you there it is too long but i could tell that you find abandoned blog in most cases they didn’t love them blogs they are looking for fast money earning
Very interesting stats. My wife falls into the abandonment camp. She took a blogging vacation last April, never to return.
To paraphrase Ringo Starr, time takes time. Steady blog readership builds slowly. If you have a niche for your blog, the worst thing you can do early on is obsess over site hits. Just keep writing and people will find you until you learn to use networking tools to further promote your site.
But blogs are like anything else. If you have the type of personality to gets easily excited by a new hobby, only to burn out quickly, your blog will have the shelf life of Chris Gaines.
Great post, and good debate to open. I have been faithful to my work blog and it did jump up in page rank with in four months, but had to abolish it, broke the no commerical blog policy and didn’t know about it, so I started a new one. There is one that I have watched for a certain term that hasn’t been posted on since late september, and they are on top, because of links I am told!
Many ‘abandoned’ blogs may very well be niche marketing sites. They capture considerable search traffic and thus Adsense and other advertising clicks.
That is a very interesting post. Incidentally, I’m just back after a month of not blogging due to family illness.
I have to say it was really hard to get back into the blogging routine after being away that long.
I did think the number of abandoned blogs would be a bit higher as well. That must of taken hours, even days to research.
Great info.