6 Key Facts About Blogging in 2020

The year is 2020, and the world of blogging is very different than it was years and decades ago. Ever since the paradigm shift of 2011, where the modern blogging era began, there has been an ongoing revolution in content. It’s an intense and competitive world out there, but sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of just how insane the internet truly is.

Fact: WordPress hosts over 70 million new posts every month.

WordPress is one of the world’s largest blogging platforms, and with the stats to prove it. Between everyone publishing on their own hosted WordPress sites and everyone on WordPress.com, WordPress alone accounts for over 70 million new pieces of content every month. To take that to one scale, that’s 840 million posts per year. To take it the other direction, that’s around 27 new posts every single second.

Back in the early 70s, when the internet was new and limited, there were people who could claim to have read everything posted on it at the time. You can safely bet that today, no such person could possibly exist.

Fact: The most common word count for new posts is between 1,231 and 1,351.

If you remember the internet before 2011 and the contentpocalypse, it was a very different place. Content was short. The same post might show up on dozens or hundreds of sites, all competing for the same slice of the keyword pie. Trying to find actual valuable content in the sea of spam was becoming harder and harder every year.

2011 marked the release of Google’s Panda update, which prioritized two things: value and uniqueness. In order to be worth ranking, content needed to be unique and not copied from other sites, and it needed to have value.

Webmasters and marketers quickly discovered that, more than anything, length was strongly correlated to value in content. Where 200-300 word posts used to flood every website, now 500, 750, even 1,000 word posts became the norm.

These days, the most common new word counts range between 990 and 1,350 words, with the upper end being slightly more popular. Of course, truly valuable content doesn’t stop there; it’s not uncommon to read posts with counts at 2,000, 3,000, or even more.

Fact: People read over 21.1 billion WordPress posts every month.

All of that content being published every second of every day? It’s not just shouting into the void. People see it, people find it, and people read it. Billions of posts are being read on every platform all around the internet, and it shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

80% of internet users regularly read blog posts. Of the remaining 20%, many of them still read the occasional post, because what is the internet if not content? It’s just a matter of how you draw the line at “regularly”.

Marketers are largely responsible for much of the content online, though not all of it. Marketers are also prone to following what works while abandoning what doesn’t. If blog content didn’t work, you’d never see numbers like the statistics above.

Fact: A majority of consumers feel that a blog adds credibility to a website.

Blogs do it all. They inform. They make you question your assumptions. They teach you new facts. They guide you on how to accomplish tasks. They help you solve problems.

All of that, when you produce that content, is what you do. As the author of the blog and the owner of the website, you’re the one showcasing your experience, your knowledge, and your credibility.

Consumers feel that way, but what if they’re wrong? It’s not unusual for the hive mind of the masses to be off-track. Luckily, Google concurs. Google’s recent updates focus on something they’ve dubbed the EAT score: Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Blogs, through producing unique, high quality, valuable content, promote your brand’s expertise, your authority, and your trustworthiness.

Fact: A third of consumers cite a blog as the #1 credibility factor.

Perhaps not everyone rates a blog so highly, but a third of all consumers feel that a blog is the number one most important factor in a website’s credibility. It makes sense, after all. What sort of site has a blog? One that cares, one that wants to showcase expertise, one that wants to inform and engage its readers.

Conversely, what kind of site doesn’t have a blog? One that doesn’t care. One that was thrown up as a microsite or a thin affiliate with no long-term goals. One that, at the end of the day, simply doesn’t deserve attention it doesn’t work to receive.

Fact: Blogging is more important than ever before. What are you going to do about it?