Did TikTok and Instagram murder blogging?
Short answer, maybe.
Long answer, maaaaaaaybe?
Let me explain.
Where should I begin?
Right at the start I suppose. The first blog was Links.net, back in 1994 when a fellow student got bored one day and made his first website to publish his writing. This student was Justin Hall, who wanted a place to share this thoughts, his own academic work and some website links that he enjoyed (probably some memes back in the 90's).
But just like content creators nowadays, when they see someone doing a novel thing and is getting a lot of attention, they started doing it too, thus during the age before the term "blogging" was born, these sites were known as "Online Diaries" or "Personal Pages", which makes you wonder why they were shared to the entire internet. In 1997, when the "Online Diaries" formula was worn out and people couldn't find ways to continue innovating, Jorn Barger from his own site called Robot Wisdom referred and coined these sites as "weblog".
Since making a website was a really technical thing to do back in the day, most of the sites were made by programmers that talked about nerdy stuff. But on 1998, Jonathan Dube did the unthinkable and made a blog about something actually fun, an event. He "weblogged" an event called Hurricane Bonnie for the Charlotte Observer. The website looked something like this:
This masterpiece, along with the creation of something called the "Open Diary", which was a platform that allowed people to comment on their writing allowed people with no programming experience to also interact with others. A few tweak and changes were made, including the term "blogging" by Peter Merholz in 1998.
TikTok on the clock, on the clock, but the party won't stop.
As Kesha once famously said, oh whoa, whoa-oh.
TikTok is undeniably a worldwide phenomena, starting as a rival for an app called Musical.ly. It was called Douyin (抖音) at first, but was renamed TikTok to appeal to it's international users. The two apps were fighting in a market that was relatively free of competition, with the posts consisting mainly of music playing in the background and a short video.
This formula was a bit of a hit or miss, as the content was so random, that every single frame of the 15 seconds of content was literally filled to the brim with content and information.
Yes, I said 15 seconds.
Because that is where TikTok is truly unique. For younger generations that grew up with video content, like TV, Youtube and even video games to a certain extent, their attention span is very limited and reading just isn't as interesting or appealing to them anymore.
With that being said, who doesn't like creativity?
When you are only given 15 seconds to prove yourself, what would you do to grab the attention of millions or billions of overstimulated individuals?
No matter how short, simple or straight to the point your blog is, blogs will never be able to do what TikTok does. You can't condense a blog to be a 15 seconds read, while being meaningful or interesting. You can put a lot of pictures in to to make it fancy but where do you go from there?
Everyone and their mothers know what TikTok is.
If you think about it, why are we even pitting TikTok against blogging? Why can we go up to someone, ask them if "TikTok" is killing blogging and assume they know what "TikTok" is?
Because of just good advertising.
Good advertising isn't just important for a platform to be well known, it's essential. Developed by a company in China, ByteDance understood the application that they had, and advertised outside of China, they went international, going so far as to even rebrand themselves from Douyin, to TikTok. They took a risk, they advertised all over, and it paid off. Once they got people to start talking about it, they won't stop talking about it.
Not to beat a dead horse but, after 2010, do you still see people advertising about blogs?
No, and it's not because that it's irrelevant, but it's because all the blogging sites are scattered everywhere. The one prominent blogging site, Tumblr was barely hanging on, but was shot in the head after the ban on pornography on 17 December, 2018. Tumblr was once a 1.1 billion dollar company, bought by Yahoo in an attempt to save it from drowning, but failed soon after and ended up sleeping with the fishes at a value of around 3 million.
But that's not to say that the ban was the only reason that it was bleeding of it's users, we'll get to that later.
The rise of Instagram
I never knew that one day I'd had to actually research and write about Instagram but, the things I do to pass the semester is insane.
On 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger started a video and photo sharing platform called Instagram. 2 years later, it was bought over by Facebook for 1 billion dollars.
Why did Facebook buy Instagram? What was so special about an app that mainly focuses on pictures and videos? Isn't it just the same thing as Facebook but with less features?
Well you see, that's where Instagram caught the world by storm
Instagram does one thing, but does it well
Instagram only practices one kick, but they do it very well.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger initially made Instagram as a location check-in app, called Burbn. They soon found out that users were mainly using it for the picture sharing function, so they played towards their strength and reduced the app to only picture and video sharing, in addition to renaming it Instagram.
You get a post, you get a post, and you get a post, everyone gets a post!
Instagram is owned by Facebook, and also is in cooperation with Twitter and Tumblr, making sharing images really easy. You can post on Instagram, and simultaneously post on other platforms as well. This allows ease of access for those who just wanna live in the moment while sharing their experiences with others. The unique "story" feature also allows ads to be incorporated without much disruption for the user experience.
While we're on the topic of advertising, Instagram started with only 25,000 users, but some of them were big names, namely Jack Dorsey, who was the co-founder of Twitter, tweeted about it. This made Apple users to flock to Instagram and on a brilliant part on Instagram's part, they released the Android version two years after the original Apple launch. With more than 30 million iPhone users taking pictures on Instagram, they used the Word-Of-Mouth advertising method to keep the none iPhone users craving to be apart of this fad. Due to this, on the Android release 2 years later, there were over 1 million downloads on the first day.
Once again, we see how marketing and good advertising played a crucial role in starting of a social media platform right.
Where does that leave blogging?
Blogging is by no means dead, it just evolving. Instead of writing down their experience and thoughts on a page or site, they are instead sharing it through videos. If you narrow down the meaning of blogging as a form of writing only, then you will be sorrily disappointed.
Blogging is not dead, and it won't be in the foreseeable future. Although, it will be interesting to see where the internet will take blogging from here on out.
Reference list:
Anon 2021, A year after Tumblr's porn ban, some users are still struggling to rebuild their communities and sense of belonging, viewed 4 October, 2021, <https://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-porn-ban-nsfw-flagged-reactions-fandom-art-erotica-communities-2019-8>.
Anon 2021, The History of Blogging: From 1997 Until Now (With Pictures), viewed 4 October, 2021, <https://themeisle.com/blog/history-of-blogging/>.
Anon 2021, Word-of-Mouth: Instagram Gained One Million Users in 3 Months, viewed 4 October, 2021, <https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/instagram-marketing-strategy/>.
