Is Blogging Getting Old, Or Is It Just Me?

10/10/2013, CelineNyx, Discussion , 43

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while, but this post written on the blog Daisy Chain Book Reviews made me want to talk about it on my blog. Although I don’t think blogging overall is going out of fashion – so many new blogs keep getting created every day – but I do feel like book blogging is changing somehow.

Old generation VS new generation

The main trend I’m spotting is that there is becoming a rift between “old” bloggers and the newer ones. Of course there are plenty older blogs that evolve with blogging itself and will keep up with the changes – but many of them don’t. They will fall behind, and so many awesome older have been quitting lately that I can’t help but think that this has to do with blogging in general.

So what is the difference? That’s a hard question to answer because I myself are irrevocably stuck in my old blogging ways. I’ve been blogging on Nyx Book Reviews for three and a half years, and in internet standards my blog is nearly ancient. I still blog the same way as I did years ago. Some features came and went, designs changed, I branch out more in my reading and I receive more ARCs, but the essence of Nyx Book Reviews is the same. I could easily post something I wrote years ago today, and no one would notice.

The only observations I can make towards the new bloggers are shallow ones. I can only look at them from the outside. I’m the internet equivalent of the elderly man walking up to some teenagers saying “what’s up dog”. They seem to be using a lot of GIFs in their reviews (GIFs weren’t nearly as commonplace in reviews years ago as they are now – I would actually dare say basically no one used them when I started out). They usually also have a successful Youtube channel. Most of them belong to a clique of other like-minded new bloggers, and they frequent each other’s blogs at least weekly.

I feel old

Not in the physical sense of the word. I’m not old, I’m nineteen. My blog however, feels old. While the flashy bloggers use GIFs, I use plain old boring text. My Youtube videos get nowhere near as many views as my written counterparts do – it seems as if my followers are just as old-fashioned as I am. As for my blogging friends, we usually just tiredly wave to each other across the internet, having a mutual understanding that we simply don’t have the time to comment on each other’s blogs every day. Hell – sometimes we won’t even comment on them for a month.

Will there be a place for blogs like mine in say, a year? Two years? Will my audience just shrivel up and die? Questions like these have been haunting me the last few months, and they have made me reconsider me being blogging at all. Should I keep going till the very end? How do you know it’s time to stop? I’ve been considering making Nyx Book Reviews a review site instead of a review blog, which would be a minor change but an important one. I haven’t decided on the matter yet though.