New Blogger Initiative a Year Later – Who Survived?

It was just a year ago that Syp kicked off his Newbie Blogger Initiative plan.

The idea was to inflict blogging on as many newcomers as possible by getting a bunch of old cranks to give semi-useful and often contradictory advice about blogging.  And link whoring.

As is clear from that, I went for a humorous/cynical/sarcastic spin on the whole thing.  That was because, in the past, I have read so much horrible, inappropriate, or just bad from all rational perspectives advice on blogging that it practically puts me at the laugh/cry fork in the road.  And I always choose to laugh, which doesn’t make me very popular at funerals I must admit.  I end up thinking “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants” and it is all down hill from there.

Yes, there are a lot of nuts and bolts things you can speak to about themes, fonts, statistics, comment moderation, spam, and the like.  But when it comes to the actual motivation and philosophy of blogging, the only universal I could come up with is:

Be the blog you want to read.

Which isn’t very helpful.

And I have nothing for any subsequent existential crisis which might result from realizing that you don’t actually want to read your own blog.  But it seemed better than telling somebody they need to put a picture of a cat in every post or whatever the SEO experts are saying of late.

Anyway, there was much enthusiasm.  Lots of people trotted out advice of all sorts (a list of some of the posts here), some of which was actually more useful than I expected.  Nobody actually told people to post pictures of cats.  The usual wet blankets had to chime in that it was all a wasted effort, because that is what wet blankets do.  Why deny them their place.

In the end, by my count, 110 new blogs were created and were being blogged on by new bloggers here in Blogsylvannia.  I have them all listed and linked in another post.

But now that a dozen months have flown by, I thought I would take a look at the mortality rate for NBI blogs.  Of 110 who started, how many are still active?

The answer is 30, or 27% of those that started.

Active is, of course, subject to interpretation.  My bar for being considered an active blog was still being at your URL (or having noted a forwarding address) and having posted something on or after April 1, 2013.

That leaves the following blogs, which you should go visit and congratulate.

1. Adventures of Danania, Supergirl of Lorien
2. Ald Shot First
3. Altaclysmic
4. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
5. Bloodthorne
6. Casual Aggro
7. Casually Vicious
8. Conveniently Placed Exhaust Port
9. Dreadblade
10. Elfkina vežička
11. Funsponge
12. Game Delver
13. Goetia’s Letters
14. Mighty Viking Hamster
15. MMO Juggler
16. MMO One Night a Week
17. Neurotic Girl
18. Ravalation
19. Red Neckromonger
20. Sephora’s Closet
21. stnylan’s musings
22. That Was An Accident!
23. Unwavering Sentinel
24. Vagabond Goes for a Walk
25. Warlockery
26. Warp to Zero
27. White Charr
28. Why I Game
29. Wynniekin’s Adventures
30. World’s End Tavern

Is that a lot or a little, good or bad?

I suppose it depends on your point of view.  The only other data I have on the subject is from when I did The Great Survey of Linking Blogs back in September 2011.  During that I went back and checked on all 281 of the outgoing links for blogs that at some time put me in their blog roll.  I found that of 263 unique blogs, 74 were still active, which totals up to about 28%.

So 27% from that sample size seems to be about par for the course, as far as I can tell.

New World Tavern and Casual Aggro did similar round up posts, though their criteria was a bit different (as were their counts), so they came up with 40% and 25%  respectively.  As they say, your mileage may vary.  Avatars of Steel also has a post about the NBI, while there is a class of 2012 badge up for participants over at Ravalation.

And what of the other 80 blogs?  A bit on that after the cut.

I have put the remaining blogs into three categories, one of which is an exception cases.

The exception is Giddeon’s Hammer, which got consolidated into a general blog by the same author.  So does that count as still up or not?  I decided that, since there were no game related posts since April 1, it did not.  But it gets a special mention here at the top.

Then there are the deleted blogs.  When you visit their URL, they are no longer there or their domain has been camped or taken over by some other entity.  There were 10 of those.

1. Beyond Reproach – Deleted
2. Big Numbers – Deleted
3. Glimpses from Middle-earth – Deleted
4. GnomeGates.com – Deleted, domain camped
5. Horn & Ivory Gates – Deleted
6. Mistress of Illusions – Deleted
7. MMO Asylum – Deleted
8. Noob Raider – Turned Japanese
9. SWTOR from Scratch – Deleted
10. Windy Acres Ranch – Deleted

Which leaves us with 69 blogs still around but no longer being updated.  Those are actually the most interesting of the bunch, since those have a last post date.  So we can see how long people lasted at the effort.  The first four months saw more than half of those whole would stop give up.  But that seems reasonable, as people figure out whether the blogging is for them or not.

• May – 12 stopped
• June – 9 stopped
• July – 7 stopped
• August – 6 stopped

After that drops start to slow down, but people keep dropping.

• September – 4 stopped
• October – 5 – stopped
• November – 3 stopped
• December – 3 stopped
• January – 2 stopped

Then there is a sudden surge.  I am not sure what happened in February.

• February – 11 stopped
• March – 6 stopped
• April – 1 stopped (said farewell)

Which brings us to the full year.

Beyond this point is my data set of blogs I considered inactive and the date of their last post.  You can double check me for errors, if you are so inclined.

• Raspberry Jammed – May 4
• Adamant Nomad – May 11
• Battlemastered – May 13
• Omens of Onterion – May 17
• Eons and Eons Away – May 17
• MMOARprz – May 17
• My Staff is Bigger Than Yours – May 18
• We do it the WASD Way! – May 20
• Toastman’s Blog – May 21
• Wynnie goes F2P – May 25
• Middle-earth Initiative – May 28
• Donovan Drones – May 30
• thenotsonewnoob – June 2
• /con mmob – June 4
• Not Too Heavy – June 5
• Newbie Hobbit – June 11
• The Diverted Muse – June 17
• Lotro Family of Flosiin Nightsong – June 21
• Crafty’s Corner – June 21
• AntiPlasmaFrequency – June 25
• Gaming for Introverts – June 29
• EVE All Night – July 1
• Real Adventures in Fake Worlds – July 1
• Argus or Bust – July 1
• Gaming Abroad – July 9
• Horrible Ball of Fire – July 13
• commentarilies – July 23
• Warcraft Street – July 25
• The Roaring Silence – August 1
• Wald’s Wanderings – August 8
• Geo’s Ironman Challenge – August 15
• The Altoholic – August 15
• Stabby McStabStab – August 19
• The Incidental Analyst – August 23
• Warrior Needs Time Badly – September 21
• Backseat Game Design – September 22
• Lotro Cinna – September 25
• Click to Loot – September 26
• Aggrolicious – October 7
• TFScribbles – October 14
• Flask Half-Empty – October 24
• Priest All The Things – October 29
• Auction House on Farm – October 29
• Deathstomp – November 1
• Landroval Style – November 7
• Kaw Kaw! Get in the Bag! – November 25
• Trippin Tyria – December 18
• The Poison Mushroom – December 21
• Unliving a Death Knight – December 23
• The Butterfly Gamer – January 1
• The 10th Level of Gaming Hell – January 17
• Diminishing Returns – February 1
• TL-DR – February 1
• Bad Tauren – February 1
• Musings of an Altoholic – February 7
• Kemwer Game Blog – February 7
• Renai Hunter – February 7
• The Blue Haired Geek – February 9
• The Frugal Gamer – February 10
• Image Heavy – February 11
• Saali in Taborea – February 12
• Malefic Incantations – February 21
• Divinity’s Reach – March 1
• Brazokie’s Blog Space – March 3
• Scattered Thoughts – March 9
• Hipstalotro – March 14
• Inside the Magic Shop – March 20
• The Loony Bin – March 30
• Healing Mains – April 11 (said farewell)