Blogging Trends: Everyone's Doing Less of What Works

Ross Hudgens (0:10)

Andy, you put out a yearly content strategy study. I read it every year. It's amazing. This year in particular, I think it was more amazing than the maze you bring normally.

There's some really interesting insights in there. Could you summarize what your takeaways were from your study?

Andy Crestodina (0:27)

Thirteen years asking a thousand content marketers to answer like 25 questions. And every year, the performance of content, the percentage of people who self-report strong results, was always between 20 and 28 percent.

Crashed.

2026? It's down to 14 percent. What happened, people? So the questions also include like, what do you do? What are your strategies? What are your channels? What are your formats? And you can easily see the difference in what people do now versus years past. And the quick takeaway is that people mostly just sort of abandon the things that work well in content, which is not good. It's sad. I'm worried. The things that worked still work, but there's just fewer people doing them.

Ross Hudgens (1:07)

What do you think the reason for that is?

Andy Crestodina (1:10)

That's the best question. And in the hundreds of comments, that's the question. Disinvestment, people looking for shortcuts. I think that good work is hard. And the things that work are things like we're doing now, like collaboration, the upgraded formats, like the Siege Media and the Orbit Media approach, original research, publishing new data.

These are things that we all know have worked well forever. And for some reason, they've been set aside. There's a huge drop in exactly the strategies that drive outcomes and arise in the things that tend not to.

Ross Hudgens (1:46)

You make me think that one pressure a lot of content marketers are under is a lot of people are getting asked to do more with less. Obviously, use AI.

Naturally, there may be a co-incentive there to not be pitching those same executives massive content investments. And that may be part of that byproduct, potentially.

Andy Crestodina (2:06)

Well, the questions include questions about AI, including what use cases are you leveraging AI. And weirdly, there is no correlation between any AI use cases and performance.

AI is table stakes, but it does not give anybody an edge.

There's no indication that using AI will help drive outcomes. So it's probably more of a culture, an investment shift, a leadership pressure kind of thing where, hey, we need to do more with less, like spend less time on that blog thing, and I need you to do something over here. So the time is saved. There's a huge time savings, it's obvious. During the arms race era, it breaks down into eras, you can really see it's very specific. The arms race era sort of ended and the amount of time that people spent per article rose like 75% from 2014 for like 10 years, and now it's down. The average content marketer is spending 50 hours less per year on content, but maybe they're just pocketing that? I don't know, they're not really, it doesn't look like there's any reinvestment.

Ross Hudgens (3:10)

Yeah, it's an interesting time for sure.

I mean, you hinted on some of the things that people are doing less of now that still work. What were some of those things?

Andy Crestodina (3:22)

Well, I mentioned a collaboration with influencers, use of video, producing super visual content, which means just reports that have lots of images in them, the use of human editors publishing original research, and also you'll like this, keyword research still really correlates with performance. People understand systems, people who align content with demand, that is not changed whatsoever.

Ross Hudgens (3:47)

But people are doing less of that, right?

Andy Crestodina (3:49)

Less of that. People are researching keywords less. It's as if, I don't know, I feel like people are lost, like I don't know what to do now. Measurement went down, people are measuring performance.

It's a strange time to be doing this.

Ross Hudgens (4:02)

So on the AI front, one of the things you said that I thought was interesting, you said it doesn't correlate with better performance. It was also interesting that not using it was, I mean, it was all basically flat, right? Was that your kind of reaction to that data point?

Andy Crestodina (4:15)

I mean, ideation, use for editing, use for creation of images, use for writing drafts, use for creating outlines, use to create full pieces. None of those use cases really correlate with self-reported strong results.

So it looks like people's perspective on AI is that it's a tool for efficiency, but not a tool for performance.

Ross Hudgens (4:40)