Technorati Japan home page, Nov 2009
Technorati used to be one of the sites to see and be seen at. Your ranking there was highly prized; you’d add technorati tags to your blog posts and their State of the Blogosphere was a highly valued insight into blogging.
But now it’s a pale shadow of its former self, having recently closed its Tokyo office, and with dramatically lower traffic, from more than 400K visitors per day to today’s 40K:
technorati.com traffic, Google Trends, Nov 2009
Indeed, in early 2009 Technorati was overtaken by a blogging search engine I must confess I’ve never heard of, blogcatalog.com in traffic:
technorati.com vs blogcatalog.com traffic, Google Trends, Nov 2009
This despite calling itself the #1 blog search engine:
Richard Jalichandra, Technorati Media CEO, says that while the company is now an ad network, Technorati.com is still a major component of the business, with 1.3 million registered users. Well, those 1.3 million registered users aren’t visiting or pinging the site very much, and the other two websites he mentions, blogcritics.org and twittorati.com, don’t seem to be making much of an impression either:
blogcritics.org and twittorati.com traffic, Google Trends, Nov 2009
Richard, who has just raised another $2 million in funding, describes the business model thus:
Our model is often misunderstood or viewed as one part vs. the actual whole, but it’s relatively simple: an ad network focused on social media, the world’s largest blog search engine [sic] and directory, a large and passionate author community, and our newest site which tracks the tweets of the most influential bloggers.
Users, however, aren’t impressed. Some have noticed what they think is spam in the technorati search results. Others have noticed that despite their claims to index 100 million blogs, in 2007, they now seem to index less than 1 million. (The current number seems to be 853,799.) Maybe this would explain why their State of the Blogosphere this year, despite claiming to be a “deeper dive into the entire blogosphere,” was all comment, survey and no data (presentation to Blog World Expo here.)
Now is this just Technorati, or is something bigger afoot? Is Technorati’s decline a reflection of its own failings or the broader decline of blogging?
Interesting post. Or is it more about the fast-changing tectonics of the online world and user behavior?
@Reg, I think it’s both. I think they dropped the ball sometime in 2007, but that also marked the beginning of the rise of microblogging–in which I’d include Facebook et al. It’s not that there aren’t lots of people still blogging, it’s maybe that those who are don’t care so much about ranking (having given way to the big players) and instead focus on writing for a specific audience, and then connecting to that audience through a combination of Facebook, twitter, RSS and LinkedIn.
Meh, I think that what they were measuring at the time needed a separate measurement – blogs. Now, all that is mainstream and mundane, and, as you say, mixed in with other forms of communication and engagement, so they are a bit irrelevant now.
We were using them to track the quality of our site and noticed that it was superseded by better metrics already in mid-2008.
I don’t think many people explicitly search blogs anymore. They search the web, and blogs sometimes turn up in the results. It probably matters more how high in Google’s PageRank you rank than how high in Technorati you rank.
VERY SAD TO SEE THE DECLINE OF TECHNORATI
Interesting article. Although you wrote this a couple of years back, I’m still reading it, so I don’t think blogs are going away. Personally I belive bloggers make the mistake of not using static pages more often. In my case I built a team based web site in 2001 which is still going strong. However, I am thinking about adding a blog for curent content.