Even Bloggers Get The Blues

There is something wrong in German bloggerland. For the last three months the authority at Technorati has been basically in freefall for many bloggers, Google has started to take away pageranks too for those who want to make some money by selling text ads, what’s next?

Robert Basic, who runs Basic Thinking which is – with about 2150 backlinks – Germany’s second most popular blog, has been tracking deutsche blogcharts week after week since August and week after week the authority of the majority of blogs has been decreasing. Aggregated the 100 top blogs lost almost 10,000 inbound links compared to their peak. Lots of sensemaking, mourning, introspection and mockery in the discussions ever since.

Jens Schröder from deutsche blogcharts – which lists the 100 most popular blogs written in German based on the authority at Technorati – has dugg into his archives and compiled this chart which displays the number of links necessary to make it number 20 (yellow), 50 (green) and 100 (red) in his list since 2006:

photo credit: deutscheblogcharts.de

While these figures seem rather low when compared to other European countries they also suggest that it might be too early to collectively grab the banjos and sing the blues. There seems to be a global trend that the blogging middle class is losing links and/or authority, most likely because a couple of blogs in the fat head are collecting most via-links which used to be the currency between blogs and reflected their relationships.

What’s interesting in Germany is that there are no profiteers in this phenomenon. The most popular blogs are also stagnant or on the decline, the power laws have not kicked in yet.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)