Is blogging dead in 2020?

I think there are two kinds of blogging, personal and for for marketing. Granted, the personal can also be marketing for yourself in a lot of cases.

Personal blogging is probably not as active as it once was as people moved to Facebook and other closed platforms but for me it feels like it's picking up again. There's a healthy ecosystem of indie bloggers, RSS feed readers and directories promoting independent blogs. So while it's not at it's peak it's still healthy and definitely not dead.

Blogging for marketing is also definitely not dead, quite the opposite. Video and Audio content doesn't really help you with attracting SEO traffic so blogging is the way to go there. This doesn't mean that you should expect a magic influx of traffic as soon as you post your first blog post. It's a bit of a long game and just getting some traffic on some semi-viral blog post isn't going to help you (except gaining some incoming links which will come in handy later).

I feel like it's a little ironic that you ask the question in a blog post 🙂. But I'm assuming you mean a personal blog? I think it's better to ask yourself if it's still valuable to have a personal website rather than just using public networks where audiences are more readily available, like you mentioned. The reason you posted this on Indie Hackers is that there's a community of like-minded individuals here, and building the equivalent around your personal website is usually years and years of work.

All that being said, I still think building a personal brand/reputation on a site of your own is important to do because then your reputation can follow you across social networks, so your opinions and content remains after a specific social network loses popularity. The other nice thing is that you can easily embed a YouTube video, podcast episode, or written post on a "blog"/personal website of your own. Something that most social networks don't allow or discourage against.

To answer your question though, if I find a person online who's voice and opinion I agree closely with, I'll typically seek out their blog/newsletter to subscribe to future posts. So I definitely think they're not dead.

In the last few weeks I spent alot of time reading tech blogs. As @schoon said, IndieHackers itself is a kind of blogging platform.

My primary intention when checking a new product website is how frequently they blog, how active are they on their twitter account. This is little important for me, if a big company is not updating their blog/twitter frequently I get little worried. Any company which stopped their tweets is a kind of indication that they are not active or serious about their product any more.

And if you notice most of the successful on IndieHackers are very active on their blogs and twitter accounts. They are constantly letting you know about their existence. Sometimes their blog posts are irrelevant.. you can find it from their content :) but still they are loud.

I definitely agree with you.

That's why I plan to change my content marketing tactic in following months.

I will only make blog posts that solve very specific problems of my reader and are very specifically designed to catch some search engine traffic ("how do I X" type posts). I also plan to keep those blog posts short and sweet.

Other content, which for some reason does not qualify for that, is less "SEO-able", or is just longer, I will be definitely moving to audio/video platforms.

I agree with you 100%. Audio/video is much more powerful nowadays and people don't do it only because they are camera-shy / they are scared to present themselves in front of others etc.

EDIT And I see people do both, which I think is especially powerful.

For example I see people writing blog posts summing up the content from the video and sharing a link to it.

This way you have SEO benefits and attention of BOTH people who like video/audio and those who prefer to read.

Blogging for me is mostly about organizing the information in my head, and retaining it for the future in a public way.

As a coder, I read technical blogs like a runner consumes water. As someone who lives in an apartment with little to no design taste, I read Reddit and apartment therapy all the time.

Plus, I have my own personal blog where I keep notes and stuff to help future me look back and laugh. https://taylorbrazelton.com

And this weekend I've even ventured into writing an interesting product type blog. You can check It out here If You Catch My Drift

It's not dead. We use our blog extensively and receive tens of thousands of page views each month

I think it just converted over to being a newsletter imho

It is not dead but it's become very hard for new bloggers to gain the trust of Google.
A recent big Algorithm upgrade in May has made it more difficult for new bloggers.
Now Google ranks very old and popular websites higher(General niche) than the ones with a specific niche with more relevant content.
One of my blog's traffic got down by 50% overnight after May 2020 upgrade.

Just want to thank everyone who added to the conversation, I read every comment and I think all had great points in them :) I think it's not black and white. It also seems that a lot of people see platforms like IH or Reddit as blogging and of course I read a lot of that type of content. That said, I was thinking more of the classic personal/business blog and newsletter approach, where the content is not necessarily linked to a central platform (that a lot of users already naturally log into every day)!

Sure it is NOT. If you think so, you are maybe just to inpatient or lazy to do real blogging 🙂