I heard a statistic the other day, every day 50,000 new blogs are started. In a working year that amounts to around 13 million blogs. The majority of those blogs are vanity projects, they are unlikely to be seen by anyone or rather be found by anyone.

Unless you are going to spend advertising dollars or pounds to get your blog seen it will probably become your little writing platform and that’s all.

Of course big corporates do spend millions promoting their blog or news channel, they believe that their customers or followers want to read their stuff.

Think about the amount of digital words you read in a day. I’m not talking about the Facebook posts, but you may wish to include that too. Yes, me too, I have no idea but if I were to make a guess it’s likely to be a maximum of 1000 words. That would be the very maximum. And yes I would include in to that any social media, although I’m no longer active on Facebook, so it excludes that, but I am including the Apple news app, which I scan very quickly.

Our attention span is suggested as being only between 8 and 59 seconds. I never understand why they give this spread, are we then supposed to calculate for ourselves the medium?

My personal guess is that it’s realistically around just 20 seconds and that’s exactly why I started creating a weekly cartoon, which is exactly 20 seconds.

Sure I’m still writing, but I have shortened my blogs considerably and yes for me I do believe they are my vanity project. I never wanted to blog, I didn’t consider myself as a writer and as English is not my first language I worried whether I would ever be able to pull it off. I’m pleased to say I have managed to train myself to write regularly now.

I did stop writing on my own blog and instead moved here to Medium as even though I don’t get that much engagement, at least the chances of being seen are greater.

Happy creating!

Michael de Groot