There are supposed to be about 4 million Indian blogs. If we take that one blogger maintains only two blogs in India, only about 2 million bloggers would be operating in India. So, 1,198 million people [plus-minus a few million] in India do not blog!
But the question is not that, it is – who do not blog, out of those who are active on the web? That gets us a more sensible number if we take that half the bloggers have quit blogging for ever: about 19 million of them do not blog out of 20 million [plus-minus a few million] people who contribute content on the www. So, what do these web-active guys do if they do not blog? Who are the ones who spend a lot of time in front of web- enabled computers and mobiles but don’t blog? And why do they not blog?
Let’s see.
We asked and observed our Orkut, Facebook and Twitter friends. We talked to many people who use these modern social media platforms, both online and in person.
Facebook is quite popular among young persons, especially college and school students. Twitter seems to be more popular among the employed youth and older people interested in personalities, politics etc. Twitter is the a medium of chatters and followers. [Canging times: earlier we were taught to follow achievers, now we follow incessant talkers!] Serious thinkers / writers / creators do not seem to belong to this medium except when they want to tweet out their achievements.
Most of the young web users have jumped to the latest platforms without graduating from static websites and blogs. So, the less dynamic platforms such as blogs and websites do not offer them what they need - instant information on matters they love, instant chat with friends, instant multi-way gossips, instant commenting on controversies, instant sharing of photos and videos, and so on. This group comprises people who do not blog, unless they are thinkers too. In India the contrast gets magnified as internet penetration is rising by leaps and bounds.
Let’s share our own experience of surveying the Indian blogosphere. After exploring it for our February 2011 and June 2011 rankings and scouring it further for expanding the Directory of Best Indian Blogs, we can say that we must be among a handful of people in the world who have manually [not using software for popularity check etc] examined over twenty thousand Indian blogs. What we found among Indian blogs, in the context of the present question, is this:
A very large number of the blogs have only a couple of posts that were created when blogging came to fashion. Some bloggers opened dozens of blogs and gave up all except a couple. Some bloggers opened their blogs and ran them with lots of passion, but they got bored because of the discipline it demands. When it comes to discipline, bloggers can get influenced by any conceivable excuse: change in job, marriage, birth of a child, a small health issue, real or imagined busyness…
Some bloggers have automated their blogs, so they themselves do not have to do anything to run them. Some copy passages and photos from the web, paste them into their blogs and do nothing else.
In our opinion, this group of ‘bloggers’ must belong to ‘the people who do not blog’. They must be over a million or half of those who have taken to blogging ever.
Blogging requires hard work and discipline. It demands an urge to write / create. Blogging demands much more work than just typing out one or two casual sentences or making a pithy comment on Anna’s fast. It survives when the blogger has passion for blogging. Not one out of two bloggers survives this drill. Those who survive reap the joy of blogging.
Coming back to non-bloggers, this lack of drive along with availability of ‘instant’ social media platforms explains why blogging is seen to be getting less popular. So, our answer to the question is: most people do not blog, the same way as most people don’t write books, make paintings or perform in films.
Post script: There has been talk of decline of blogs over the last few years. Our logic, experience and study tell us that the number of blogs and bloggers is, in fact, growing. We’ll explain that in a post sometime later.
