You're likely familiar with the famous bubbles in recent history, the housing bubble, the tech stock bubble and the beanie baby bubble. They all have similar characteristics. It seems like a quick and easy way to make money and it creates interest in others to jump on board. The increased level of speculators in the market helps fuel demand, prices and revenue. It seems like we might be having the same thing going on and there might be a blog bubble. Quite possibly a bubble in making money online in general.
First let me start out by saying that blogs are a great format for certain types of content and I don't see them going away any time soon. You can make money blogging but you need to understand that not all blogs make money.Blogs have been around for over 10 years but it's only been in the past few years that they gained the popularity they have today. Everyone has heard of blogs, many people have them and many are sick of hearing the word blog.
What I've been noticing lately is that a lot of blogs are on the same subject, how to make money blogging. Searches for terms such as make money blogging, blog for money, etc. turn up millions of results.
A few bloggers that started out making blogs about how to make money blogging have found success, and many more have flocked to try to emulate them. Instead of finding their own niche to blog about, they start out by blogging about blogging. There's good reason for doing that since there is so much demand for information on the subject, but the supply of information is overwhelming and not everyone will be able to get a substantial piece of the pie. If you came too late to the blog party, you're likely out of luck unless you can create outstanding content and promote it well.
When you visit these blogs on making money blogging, you'll see the same ads or variations on the same themes. They're all about driving traffic to your site, different ad programs, ebooks on how to promote or monetize your blog, etc. You've probably seen what I'm talking about. It almost becomes like a ponzi-scheme, where new participants need to buy into the system to keep it going. Just like other bubbles.
According to Google trends, most of the searches for topics related to making money blogging are coming from less developed countries such as Malaysia, India and the Philippines. This makes sense when you look at how much money bloggers make. It's not much if you live in North America or Europe, but if you live in a country where a couple hundred dollars a month is a lot of money, there is a big incentive to create blogs that target countries like the USA where there is more traffic and money spent online.
This also explains why there is so much copied content, or you understand the English words written on the webpage, but something just seems a bit off. A lot of times you'll find people posting in forums that have great difficulty speaking English enough to ask a question, but their sites are all in perfect or almost perfect English. Maybe it's not a bubble, maybe blogging is just getting outsourced.
This may seem odd for me to say since this blog is about making money online. The truth is, I have no delusions about this site becoming a good source of revenue, or that it will even get a lot of traffic. I just wanted a place to share my thoughts with the people who come to me for advice. This helps me to avoid repeating myself and I can just direct them here. By making it public, can benefit from it, or just laugh at my stupidity if I'm wrong.
I don't think this is contained to only blogs about blogging. There are a lot of topic areas or niches that have either dried up or the market has been saturated by other bloggers. I have a general rule of thumb I apply when I hear people pitching expensive products and services to help you make easy money, if someone's trying to teach you how they made money, the market is already soft. The additional suckers jumping into it will just make it softer. This doesn't apply to blogs or other forms of making money online. Use it for any get rich quick scheme.
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