A recent report by Gartner predicts that blogging has just about reached its peak, suggesting that there is a point in time where the non-serious will get bored and move on.
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Are we seeing this in the procurement blogosphere?
Well, as Spend Matters, Sourcing Innovation, and Supply Excellence continue to consistently blog away with good content in 15, 7, and 5 posts per week, respectively, other blogs in the procurement blogosphere may be proving out Gartner’s theory.
For example, it has been over two months since Purchase Realm has featured a new post. The output at Procurement Central has slowed to six posts in November and just three so far in December, with barely any posts about procurement. Vendor Management has had one post since September.
So does that mean that the days of the procurement blog are over?
I don’t think those days are over completely, but I think that there will be very few procurement blogs standing at this time next year.
Spend Matters, with its sponsorship program, seems to have successfully monetized its blog. However, if indications are that blogging is peaking, there’s always the chance that the owner of that blog may see it is a good time to sell and cash out. The ROI would be maximized at this point, like when FreeMarkets went public at the peak of the dot-com bubble and had its stock go up to, what, like $300/share, making the founders much richer than they would have been if they took FMKT public just months later.
This thought is just an outsider’s viewpoint. Though I’ve met Jason, I have no idea whether or not cashing out is in his plans. But if he’s in it for the long haul, I do think that Spend Matters will survive due to its growth and the fact that there is real cash being taken in. (Xanax)
Supply Excellence consistently has great content. But, with Tim being the VP of Marketing, surely one has to question whether there is a higher-impact use of his time. Without sponsorships, using a blog purely for branding makes the payback hard to measure. One has to speculate that there may be pressure for Tim to use what is probably highly-compensated time towards activities that have a more direct financial benefit.
And it seems that someone with the pure intellectual horsepower of Michael over at Sourcing Innovation will be in massive demand for consulting once more and more people discover his capabilities. So is his blog just a means to capture consulting business and, once he gets it, will he abandon blogging? Again, though I know the author, I’m not sure what his long-term plans for the blog are.
As for this blog, it never was a big part of Next Level Purchasing’s outreach, so I don’t see much change. NextLevelPurchasing.com has so much content on it, I am always reluctant to add more content that may be less formal. So this blog will continue to ramble along, with about 2-3 posts per week for the foreseeable future. A cool new feature or two may be in the works, too!
So, let’s all plan on meeting here in about six months to see where the aforementioned procurement blogs are. It should be interesting!