One Fine Jay administers a brutal fisking to John C. Dvorak, professional crumudgeon/columnist, for his PC Magazine article predicting the demise of blogging.

Let me focus on Dvorak’s stats backing this up:

Let’s start with abandoned blogs. In a white paper released by Perseus Development Corp., the company reveals details of the blogging phenomenon that indicate its foothold in popular culture may already be slipping (www.perseus.com/blogsurvey). According to the survey of bloggers, over half of them are not updating any more. And more than 25 percent of all new blogs are what the researchers call “one-day wonders.” Meanwhile, the abandonment rate appears to be eating into well-established blogs: Over 132,000 blogs are abandoned after a year of constant updating.

Perseus thinks it had a statistical handle on over 4 million blogs, in a universe of perhaps 5 million. Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.

The most obvious reason for abandonment is simple boredom. Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs. Some people must feel the futility.

Now, there are plenty of reasons why people may be abandoning blogs. Some people may, in fact, be abandoning blogging altogether. Some have decided to take their thoughts private, so they move. Some may join group blogs. Many migrate from Blog*Spot to hosting providers. Many move from one Blog*Spot address to another—heck, Blogger even advocates the practice. Some bloggers have backup blogs hosted elsewhere. Some people—Matt Stinson, Dan Drezner—have done more than one of these. All of these “failure modes” are lumped together, because it’s simply too hard to track what’s going on.

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics would be like noting that DirecTV loses 570,000 customers a year, and arguing this means satellite television is doomed. “Churn”—what business calls the continual cycle of losing customers—is a natural aspect of any phenomenon in which collective preferences are aggregated. Companies lose customers, but they also gain new ones. Citizens move in and out of the voting population. And some people decide blogging isn’t for them—but a lot of others do. If there are really 5 million blogs—that is, one blog for every thousand human beings alive today, and perhaps one for every hundred with Internet access—that’s a truly staggering statistic. But I guess Dvorak’s just the latest in the long line of media dinosaurs that doesn’t “get” that.

Perseus' blog has a response to my post (and, by extension, the Dvorak piece). They note that only 1.6% of abandoned blogs include any forwarding information, and go on to write:

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics…

Better to say its a weak argument to declare blogging a failure in a study that showed the number of hosted blogs growing from 135,000 at the end of 2000 to over five million at the end of 2003.

They’re right, of course; what I meant was what Perseus wrote: that Dvorak’s conclusions had weak support from the statistics. Sorry for the confusion.

Via Matthew Stinson.