We love short.
Concise 140-character limits. GIFs. Texts. Snaps. Vines. Photos. Summaries. Notifications. Emoji. Slang. Yo.
But some of Silicon Valley's biggest, smartest tech companies and investors are going long on long. And not long videos, either. They seem to be doubling down on good old-fashioned words.
Last week, Facebook updated its little-known Notes feature to encourage users to write "more beautiful and customizable" posts separate from status updates. Medium announced a $57 million round of funding (on Medium, of course) and is holding a VIP event next week to reveal new features. Everyone's favorite unicorn Slack relaunched its Posts feature to help users write longer at work. And Re/code reports that Twitter is building a product to allow users to share posts longer than the typical 140-character limit.
None of these are exactly the same, but they sure sound similar. And familiar, too: Back in the day, they used to call it blogging.
Blogging emerged during the Silicon Valley doldrums between the dotcom bust and the Facebook boom. But, as readers' attention has migrated to apps and platforms, blogs have faltered. Standalone websites where writers unspool their daily musings are a tough sell when social platforms funnel huge streams of status updates to a single destination.
But social platforms don't lend themselves to the expression of longer, more complex ideas. Facebook and Twitter posts, as we know all too well, force you to sacrifice subtlety for space. (Medium has the opposite problem—it's always existed as a venue for longform; now it's trying to build a bigger audience.) Platforms have figured out how to monopolize their attention; in a way, bloggers should be glad that they're now getting more tools to command that attention for themselves without having to compress their thoughts into an arbitrarily small box. Yes, you give up a degree of independence when you commit your content to someone else's site. But you also become much easier to discover.
Such are the tradeoffs of a post-web world. The blog—a shortening of "weblog" is on its way out. Now we're blogging on platforms. We are—yes, we're going to say it—plogging.
The Internet is literally a world wide web of content. It's a mess. While blogs were once ubiquitous, our habits have since changed. As Ezra Klein wrote earlier this year, it's hard being a blogger today, because to succeed you need to be able to scale. But since many readers are reading on platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, rather than seeking out destination news sites or blogs directly, scaling a blog—finding loyal readers and ad revenue—is tough.
Tech companies are offering bloggers a solution to that problem. Instead of having a blog on Wordpress or Blogger that readers will likely only find through links on Facebook or Twitter anyway, people who want to write and share their content can post it on Facebook or Medium (or possibly soon Twitter) separate from their regular feeds.
Why would bloggers do that? Facebook and Medium are betting that what they can offer potential bloggers is better than what those bloggers could get elsewhere: a clean, simple experience, the potential for visibility where an audience already exists, and (perhaps) the kind of money that comes with scale. As Stratechery's Ben Thompson has argued, if most bloggers (the long tail of content on the Internet) posted their stories to Medium, the site could curate them, bring in regular readers, and attract a sizeable number of advertisers willing to pay for, say, native ads. Bloggers wouldn't have to worry about anything from the design of the site to ad sales. Medium could even potentially pay some bloggers more than they would be able to reap on their own.
Meanwhile, Facebook hasn’t given any indication that it plans to allow ads on Notes or that it would pay bloggers. But it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine Facebook one day letting popular Notes writers have ads on their posts much like Instant Articles partners can gets ads through Facebook, or that Notes would function for individuals like paid posts do for businesses: they could be shared to a larger audience for a fee.
But none of these companies are simply trying to save blogging because they're nostalgic for the early aughts. They're just looking for one more way to capitalize on what they already do best: get you to look.
Facebook already has an audience, but to keep you—and more people like you—within Facebook's world longer, it needs to deliver ever-more of what you want to see. By staying out of the content business itself, Facebook becomes dependent on users to create and share the best stuff.
The company has built products to encourage news organizations, celebrities, and businesses to post to Facebook. Notes are another way of bringing a specific kind of content creator to Facebook—the blogger. If Facebook can encourage some bloggers to use Notes, which are streamlined and clean, Facebook gets more content—more content to keep people on Facebook.
Medium has a different mission. It's not the hub of your social network; rather, it wants to be a destination. But unlike publications with a specific brand identity—like, say, WIRED—Medium isn't looking to become a destination by serving up content about one subject or idea. Medium hopes to become the place where you hang out online by publishing a wide range of stuff that shares one characteristic: it's good.
"Many digital media companies are trapped in a negative cycle. Distribution happens primarily through networks that optimize clickthrough over quality, forcing creators to learn content and marketing parlor tricks instead of allowing them to focus on creating fresh perspectives," Medium said in announcing its new funding round.
"This has left a large and influential audience underserved. It has forced advertisers to look elsewhere for deeper engagement. And it has frustrated individual writers and organized media brands alike... We aim to surface quality.”
In other words, Medium is betting that if it can draw enough content creators—bloggers, journalists, chefs, music critics, startup founders—with its well-designed publishing tools, it will be able to collect a critical mass of quality posts that will keep people around.
And they just might. Because, despite the everyday tweetstorm that rains down on our heads, words still matter. (You've read this far, haven't you?) Blogs and the longer forms of expression they accommodate won't die. You're just likely to start finding more and more posts distributed through fewer channels. So long blogging. Hello plogging.
