Blogging Fame Can Fade Quickly

Posted on April 15, 2006

Whisky Bar, a blog anonymously blogged by Billmon, won the Koufax blogging award a couple years ago. Blinq reports that Whisky Bar has gone through a couple periods of little or no blogging that may have hurt the blog's popularity.

He's a little burned out, he says, a little depressed. He's wondering if this is a natural cycle with blogging -- something that saps so much of your being. He's threatening to launch something completely different. Maybe a blog on the history of travel.
"When you are doing it, it really is quite addictive," he said the other day. "When I'm not doing it, I don't want to go back. I feel like Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows. Once he walked out of his hole in the ground and discovered the world, he didn't go back for months."

The article says the blogger Billmon wasn't posting as frequently last Winter and as a result the blog traffic has slowed.

With the let-up came a frightening realization for one who worked in the moment. While he never received the amount of hits of an Atrios, Daily Kos or Instapundit, his name carried weight in blog and political circles.
"Now I am coming across more and more people who have never heard of me. The Internet moves 10 or 20 times the speed of regular time. Unless you're really on top of things, the world forgets about you really fast. It's hyper-true in the blogosphere."

A little proof you can lose an audience almost as quickly as you built it. Whisky Bar has been posting frequent, long posts in April, so perhaps they will quickly regain any lost traffic and name recognition. The beauty of having some past fame is that you can regain it. New bloggers don't have that luxury and must keep blogging until they build an audience and blogosphere recognition.