There’s a been a gear shift in blogging recently.
It’s been quiet and unassuming but it’s also been a powerful one. Up to this point I’ve been enjoying watching the small changes from the sidelines but off the back of some brilliant posts by Gem, Becky, and Victoira – among so many others – I felt it’s about time I throw my proverbial hat into the arena.
The shift I’m talking about is less to do with the content – though it obviously plays a big part in all our lives – and more to do with the attitude to blogging itself and what ‘we’ as bloggers ‘do’. Again, I’m gonna sound like a broken record when I talk about how blogging used to be a few years ago.
I remember it well because I studied the community during my A Levels when I tried to dissect the fashion industry during media studies. It was a fascinating new arena of media. You had people like Tavi, BryanBoy and ‘Style Bubble’ on the FROWs but PR agencies and designers still side-eyed us as amateur. We weren’t Wintour or Shulman. We were people taking photos in our bedrooms of our outfits, writing about fashion week on the sidelines and reviewing beauty products we’d bought on the weekend.
It was fairly new. It was exciting. It was fresh.
It was an emerging industry with pioneers who weren’t afraid to embrace social media early on or commandeer Blogger or WordPress as their own personal platforms for publication.
Then what I call the Blogging Big Bang happened. Tavi and Susie weren’t the only ones on the FROW. Bloggers took over fashion week and were getting major sponsorship deals and magazine columns. I myself joined the fray in 2010, amongst so many others. And our numbers swelled exponentially. Blogging held the promise of something big on the horizon – a shake up of the establishment – and everyone wanted to be part of it. The media took notice and made ‘blogging’ a word uttered by the general public. Once the wholly taboo thing about sharing your life on the Internet became a ’thing’. Your best friend, your co-workers and your Mum were starting blogs too.
It’s easy to look from the outside-in and consider bloggers during this time to be all the same. Perhaps on the surface we were. To the public we were people who wrote about fashion, lifestyle or beauty and got free stuff or got to go to fabulous parties in return. For the most part, yes, there was a lot of that. Blogging turned into something more professional, more polished and in a way more homogenised. The standards were and are still high to gain followers loyal enough to keep coming back.
But when the stakes are that high a community cracks. With so many ‘blogs’ in the blogsphere it no longer feels like one singular entity anymore. The so-called ‘bigger bloggers’ were escalated to the status of minor celebrities and the rest of us? I don’t know we kind of fell over the in the crossfire. Shouting over the Internet noise to be heard. I like many I too have questioned my place in the community because of this gear shift into a more ‘professional style’ of blogging. There’s just so much pressure to be great all the time. But just some of us may loose our mojo and retreat from the community we once thought we loved, there are people who start to throw caution to the wind and veer left.
And my friends it’s exhilarating to witness.
In a way it’s almost as if we’ve come full circle, bloggers are starting to tread untested water and are experimenting again. I liken it to the similar movement in the Youtube community. They too had their pioneers, have gone through a period of serious transformation, gained respect from traditional media, but many Youtubers are now going through somewhat of an identity crisis. The transparency has lifted for our audiences. They can see through fake-ness and the too polished posts. They want genuine writing. They want to see the person behind the blog.
And we as a community seem to have responded to that Many of my favourite bloggers are shifting focus, finding their mojo with other topics, and are finding their passion in ‘being a blogger’ again. There’s not really such thing as a blogging ‘niche’ anymore. Even the ‘blogging elite’ are branching out and trying new ventures they feel more passionate about.
I include myself in this shift when I honestly say I think we’re entering a new age for the blogging industry – because honestly that’s what we are now. Sure there are still sponsored posts, campaign deals, and disclaimers for freebies and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But even within these posts I can see a difference. It feels less corporate. We’re being more brave to speak out. We’re not compromising quality over quantity or stress about deadlines or following the ‘blogging rulebook’ anymore. The community has changed but with that change comes opportunity to curate content that we’re really proud of and that our readers will see that we’re excited to create.
After all, that’s why we stick around right?
It’s not for the adsense pennies, the fame, free mojitos at events or follower count. It’s the people. It’s the friendships we’ve fostered and the readers who choose to wander over to our corner of the Internet to escape their own lives.
So many of us are choosing to blog to the beat of our own drum.
And I for one am excited to be part of this new era.
p.s. if you’re after links of people who have captured the shift – including the three lovely ladies I’ve mentioned at the top of the post – in a much less round about way than I have I’ve linked them up below :)
- From Gem With Love: Fed up of ‘fitting in’
- BeckyBedbug: Why do bloggers need a niche?
- VIPXO: My experience with blogging. The honest & brutal truth
- Jennypurr: There’s no one size fits all to way to be awesome on the Internet
- Dizzybrunette: When did blogging get so serious?
- Independent Fashion Bloggers: Still blogging after 10 Years: The beauty of sticking it out
- Daisybutter: It’s not you, it’s me
- LLYMRS: Why I’m not going to fashion week
- The Private Life of a Girl: A new way to move forward with blogging
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