{"id":5992,"date":"2019-01-04T20:17:28","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T19:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/?p=5992"},"modified":"2025-09-12T15:11:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T13:11:20","slug":"die-entwicklung-der-buchblogosphare-in-den-letzten-jahren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/2019\/01\/the-development-of-the-book-blogosphere-in-the-last-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The development of the book blogosphere in recent years"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

For almost four years now, I\u2019ve been running and updating the Top List of German Book Bloggers<\/a> on this site. Since then, I\u2019ve repeatedly analyzed and taken a closer look at the book blogosphere. In my last evaluation<\/a> in February of the previous year, I concluded that both the number of newly launched blogs and the number of posts declined significantly starting in 2017. I\u2019ve now asked myself whether this trend has continued. Is blogging about books out? Is the hype over? Or is book blogging more popular than ever? A look at my Top List offers some clues.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This time I decided against rescanning and combing through all book blogs from scratch. Instead, I limited myself to the Top List and examined its changes in particular. I focused on the last 2.5 years and calculated some simple metrics. First, I looked at the number of book blogs on the Top List. Below you can see a bar chart showing the number of book blogs on the Top List per month.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

You can see that from mid-2016 to May 2018, the number of book blogs remained largely stable between 1,200 and 1,300. The highest value was reached in December 2017 with 1,323 blogs.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The explanation for the sharp drop in May 2018 is the General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) that came into force that month, which prompted numerous smaller bloggers to stop blogging altogether. A decision I can fully understand. This new requirement imposes numerous constraints and legal conditions on a simple private hobby blogger. Considerable time and effort are needed to comply with these legal provisions\u2014and even those who undertake the extensive research and the many necessary technical changes still find themselves in a legal gray area. Many of the law\u2019s formulations will only be hammered out by the courts. A risk remains, and in keeping with German Angst<\/em>, many shut down their blogs entirely.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If you look at the number of blogs added to and removed from the list each month, you get a similar picture.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

May 2018 stands out clearly. The book blogosphere shrank by 20% in that month and has since hovered around 930 book blogs. Compared to the absolute high, the number of book blogs is at 70%. This underscores the damage done in this niche\u2014and likely in many other corners of the web\u2014while large companies apparently continue to cash in smoothly on data (in this context, an interesting article on programmatic advertising<\/a>).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I wondered how the development of added and removed blogs would look without this special effect and removed the month of May. Then the picture changes somewhat.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There\u2019s still a noticeable increase in closed or no longer existing blogs around May. Overall, though, it\u2019s a steady ebb and flow that balances out quite well. Visually, I\u2019d say it doesn\u2019t look like an unusually large number of blogs closed down or an excessive number of new ones were added. There was a bit more movement in 2018, but still within a moderate range.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As a final metric, I looked at how long individual blogs have been on the Top List. I had to normalize this, of course, since the Top List itself gets older every month. So I simply calculated the average number of months blogs have already been on the Top List and related that to the age of the Top List. This yields the following bar chart, which I find the most interesting and meaningful.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It shows that from mid-2016 to the end of 2017, the average relative length of stay of blogs on the Top List steadily declined. Since 2018, however, that dwell time has been stable. In December 2018, blogs had been on the Top List for an average of 20 months (the Top List, counted from mid-2016, was 30 months old). To me, this indicates that the book blogosphere is stabilizing\u2014that many bloggers who\u2019ve been around for a long time are staying, compensating for baseline turnover. Even the whole GDPR story appears here only minimally. This suggests that many people genuinely like their blogs and continue to maintain and run them, despite hurdles. It seems only the rotten apples were shaken from the tree\u2014metaphorically speaking, not meant judgmentally.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

That matches my own perception. Since late 2014, I\u2019ve been following and reading book blogs, and many of them are still on my list and still active. Subjectively, the posting frequency feels a bit lower, but I suspect that\u2019s misleading, because some newer blogs on my list are highly active, which evens things out. All in all, I see this as a healthy development. Book blogs won\u2019t become a mass phenomenon, but they\u2019re certainly not doomed either. When I look at my RSS reader and at my own activity on Lesestunden, I feel pretty optimistic.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

One caveat: I could, of course, be completely mistaken here. I only looked at the Top List, and it\u2019s possible that numerous book bloggers have slipped under my radar, never discovered Lesestunden, and thus never signed up.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What\u2019s your impression? Is the book blogosphere shrinking? More active than ever? How many blogs do you follow, and how active are you? Do these charts confirm your impression, or do you have a completely different picture?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For almost four years now, I\u2019ve been running and updating the Top List of German Book Bloggers on this site. Since then, I\u2019ve repeatedly analyzed and taken a closer look at the book blogosphere. In my last evaluation in February of the previous year, I concluded that both the number of newly launched blogs and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The development of the book blogosphere in recent years”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"slim_seo":{"title":"Die Entwicklung der Buchblogosph\u00e4re in den letzten Jahren - lesestunden","description":"Seit knapp vier Jahren betreibe und aktualisiere ich auf dieser Seite die Topliste der deutschen Buchblogger . Seitdem habe ich immer wieder die Buchblogosph\u00e4re"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-blogosphere"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/statistics_beitrag.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11095,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992\/revisions\/11095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}