No, Book Blogging Is Not Dying: Here’s Why

Krysta and I have been blogging here at Pages Unbound since May 2012, and for probably at least the past eight years, people have been sounding the alarm that “blogging is dying.”

Concern rose with the introduction of Bookstagram and Booktube, as those platforms tend to attract much larger audiences than blogs, and worries have reached a fevered pitch with the rise of BookTok within the past year or so.

Publishers have noticeably decreased support/their interest in book bloggers, as they have moved to sending ARCs to book influencers on literally every other platform besides blogs, and many publishers no longer even mention book bloggers among the bookish influencers they appreciate — or are interested in working with. One publisher has a form that influencers can fill out to request ARCs, and selecting that you are a blogger is literally not an option.

However, I believe that there is far too much conflation of the idea that publishers are working with bloggers less with the idea that people are reading blogs less. My personal experience is that there are still many people writing blogs, and there are many people reading blogs. The audience for blogs is not going away, whether or not publishers send bloggers ARCs.

Traffic at Pages Unbound

My personal experience here at Pages Unbound is that our blog traffic has increased nearly every year (ignoring 2019), and it’s noticeably higher in more recent years than in 2012-2016.

(See bar chart of annual page views below.)

Caveats

There are some caveats here, of course. For instance, the increase in my personal blog traffic could be attributed in part to things like my becoming better at SEO, getting better at using Pinterest, commenting more on other book blogs, etc. That is to say, it’s possible I could have had better traffic in, say, 2014 if I’d done some things differently, so the fact my traffic was kind of mediocre then doesn’t mean every blogger’s was.

Because, of course, my blog traffic is not necessarily representative of all blogs. There were likely blogs in 2012-2015 that had significantly higher traffic than we did at Pages Unbound. And, unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what that traffic looked like. My observation is that bloggers were a bit more secretive years ago about their traffic, and it would not have been normal for a big blogger (or really any blogger) to publicly announce how many page views they were averaging.

So did a “big” book blog in 2014 have 5 billion page views a year, while a “big” one now has maybe 300,000? Have the “average” page views blogs get decreased over time, even while my own page views have gone up? I can’t be 100% certain, but I still think it’s significant that my own traffic has been increasing year by year, while other people keep claiming blogging is “dying.”

Our Book Blogger Stats Survey Results

Another metric we can look at is the results from the book blogger stats survey I’ve run every two years since 2016. There are the caveats here that this is a totally unofficial, unscientific survey, and the sample size of respondents is relatively small compared to how many book bloggers actually exist. However, the surveys can still help give a sense of what the “average” book blogger is getting in terms of traffic. (Read the 2020 survey results by clicking here.)

Below, I have inserted the graphs showing how many page views bloggers say they average per day, from each of the three surveys I ran.

You can see there is some slight variation. In 2026, a greater percentage of book bloggers put themselves in the 51-75 views per day category than in 2020, for instance. However, the general trend is that between 2016 and 2020, the vast majority of book bloggers were getting between 0 and 75 views per day, and there hasn’t been a lot of change in that respect. (For instance, it isn’t as if bloggers in 2016 were all getting 300 views per day, and that dropped precipitously in recent years.)

2016 Results

2018 Results

2020 Results

Edited to Add: I Really Mean People Follow Blogs Themselves

After seeing several comments suggesting that the success of blogs is contingent on keeping up with social media trends on the side, like joining Twitter, Bookstagram, or Booktok to cross-promote your blog and get blog traffic, I want to point out that that is not necessary. When I say blogging is not dying because people are reading and following blogs, I literally mean there is an audience for the blogs themselves.

The vast majority of our traffic at Pages Unbound comes from search engines (whether Google, Google-alternatives, or Pinterest), followed by people actually following the blog through WordPress or alternatives like Bloglovin’. We have a Bookstagram account but get practically zero traffic from it. We get some traffic from Twitter, but it is relatively little compared to other sources — and much of it is from OTHER people tweeting our links and not from our own Twitter account.

It is completely possible to blog and only blog and have a pretty large audience. 🙂

Here is the source of our traffic for 2022 so far:

Conclusion

My personal observations is that people are reading book blogs, and that hasn’t changed in the 11 years I have been blogging. People are also writing blogs, and while of course there’s turnover and old bloggers stop, there is also a continuous stream of new bloggers joining the community; I see people nearly every week on Twitter excitedly announcing that they have finally started their own book blog.

Publishers might not be sending book bloggers as many ARCs as they did in the past or running as many blog tours or nominating book bloggers as exceptional and noteworthy influencers — but that’s actually a completely separate question from whether blogs have readers. They do.

Publishers are focusing on other platforms because a Bookstagram photo can easily get 2,000 likes, while a “big” blog post might get 100 likes, or a TikTok can get 10,000 views in two days while a blog post gets 150. Publishing is a business, and I get why publishers are focusing their marketing budgets in places they think they’ll get more bang for their buck.

But blogs aren’t really losing readers; the other platforms are just gaining them. So, no, blogging is not dying. It has not been dying. And I do not expect it to die any time soon. Or, frankly, ever.