Mummy blogs aren’t outdated, they are evolving for the modern media landscape

I’m a niche blogger, not a mummy blogger. And I found the dismissal by Freedman ridiculous.

I think what we’re seeing is that as content marketing and blogging matures, people have less time for trash. They’re over the clockbait headlines that disappoint and erode faith in the content over time. They’re over the banality of life being shared as though it’s something wonderful. And they’re tired of things that lack authentic, genuine story.

I think Freedman failed with her big announcement on a few levels:
1) She blamed the tools. It’s not blogging or internet or content marketing’s fault she failed to diversify. It’s that she failed to match the market segment with the product.
2) She resorted to insulting her audience. Frankly, the blogging community and media community have been pretty patient with her. Underpaying contributors, offshoring editing, wrapping commercialisation of genderised products up as feminism, using clickbait and then de-crying the use of clickbait by other media outlets, being defensive and barely accountable for some major media gaffs. And now this. I don’t think people can admire Mia’s skill much any more when she spends an awful lot of time hacking at the shins of the very audiences that pay her way. She needs to accept responsibility for the mistakes she makes. And yet here we are with another mistake where it’s someone else’s fault. Failure is perfectly fine. Falling on your bottom lip though is tiresome.
3) She’s lot touch with the audience. She’s lost sight of the audience and failed to either mature her content or keep the content at the original market segment. Blogging groups yesterday all came back to one common theme- people are sick and tired of reading poor quality, inflammatory and irrelevant content. Of course your readers drop when there’s nothing they enjoy reading.
4) She’s out of touch re: tools. UGC Instagram like apps? Really?! Can someone please introduce her to the multitude of content distribution methods listed in the article above. Or the raw social media platforms of Periscope, Blab, Meerkat et al?

Zzzzz Mia.

Thank you for mentioning us and the work we do Janyne. I read that article yesterday and laughed with dismissal. What I really took from it was that something she tried didn’t work and to soften the announcement of that she said it was a result of niche blogging being dead.

We’re thriving, our community is growing and we receive hundreds of emails from readers telling us how we are the resource they come to when it comes time for travel planning and inspiration. Yep, we were interviewed for Queensland Weekender the other day, we’re in talks with a potential travel show for our road trip of the US next year, and I’m speaking at a travel forum in Istanbul next year that’s headlined by Koffi Annan. We’re definitely not dying.

Also speaking from the perspective of a reader. I’ve never read Mammamia as it seems so pointless and irrelevant, yet I read a numerous amount of blogs (and listen to podcasts from bloggers) across a wide variety of niches. In fact, blogs are the only things I read online and trust. They offer so much value and enrich my life in many ways. You can’t get that kind of connection anywhere else.

Mia has been ahead of the game for years. You mightn’t agree, but you’d have to think seriously about what she says on this.

I agree with you Kate Hunter as much as Mia Freedman annoys the crap out of me.

Podcasts baby!

You’d think the MamaMia writers would at least add they are MamaMia writers instead of allowing me to Google them and get a little cynical all on my lonesome.

There’s no shame in supporting your boss. But saying she’s “been ahead of the game for years” when you might be a little too close to the forest to see trees.

I was planning to write a story about ‘Mummy Bloggers’ only a few months ago, and put out a call for sources to interview.
Next thing, I was inundated with terse and pretty aggressive responses from a number of female journalists and bloggers, advising me I was being ‘sexist’ by using that term and it was ‘highly insulting’. I did not – and still don’t – understand how.
And yet, now I see Mia Freedman use the exact same term, and this story by Janyne Moore features the term throughout it, and yet NONE of the responses here even mention that the term ‘Mummy Bloggers’ is sexist or highly insulting.
Can someone please explain why that would be? Or is it a case that for a male journalist to use the term is insulting and sexist, but for female journalists like Janyne and Mia, it is perfectly okay?
Or could it be the social media Hysteria Brigade are not at all consistent in their code of what they choose to be offended about?

Hi Everyone,
Great to see so much passionate debate. Not so great to see my words twisted by some and taken out of context by others. My comments were a handful of sentences in an hour-long newfront presentation by MWN and referred specifically to the phenomenon, so big in the mid-aughts, of parenting bloggers (I said ‘mummy bloggers’ in colloquial reference to the way they’re most commonly known) and personal bloggers, in terms of their URL models.
Some of them, like the most famous and successful of all parenting bloggers, Heather Armstrong from Dooce, have quit this year for all the reasons I sited including a changing media landscape, blogger burnout (if you don’t know what this is then you’ve never been a blogger) and her children’s desire for privacy as they leave their baby and toddler years.
Advertisers are indeed interested in influencers and that has become a new word for bloggers in some cases. But advertisers are also demanding scale, something that independent bloggers struggle with when they are writing exclusively about their own lives and children and do not have mass reach.
Your number of Facebook followers is just one part of an increasingly broad and nuanced puzzle of reach and engagement.
It’s also true that many industries have sprung up around bloggers – consulting to them and selling their services and audiences to advertisers. That’s great. And it’s unsurprising that these people in particular have come out roaring at any suggestion the landscape is changing around parenting blogs and personal blogs. I would too if I were them. There is still money to be made around blogging, particularly for those around them.
But it’s undeniable that in a digital world where social platforms have never been more crucial, the days of attracting huge audiences to blog homepages where individuals write about the minutiae of their lives…..well, that game has changed.
I don’t say this to belittle those types of blogs or bloggers or to in any way discount the value of those blogs to their authors and niche audiences. It’s simply a huge amount of work for the individuals and it’s extremely challenging to make a living out of it.
Many have said Heather Armstrong’s evolution from personal blogger to whatever she chooses to do next is significant and symbolic of the wider parenting blog community. Time will tell.
We work with bloggers / influencers daily at Mamamia, some on staff, others as contributors. That’s only going to increase in 2016.
I hope that clarifies my comments a bit further. I have the utmost respect for bloggers and the utmost gratitude for the many personal blogs like Dooce that first inspired me to launch Mamamia back in 2007 as……a blog! Creating content online is an industry I’m super proud to be part of.
M x

I think Mia has a point that maybe wasn’t conveyed properly. I blog, write, speak and consult. I think what Mia was trying to say is that mummy bloggers or niche bloggers have an opportunity to EVOLVE their businesses or blogs. As she said, when children grow older, parents need to respect the privacy of their kids so their blogs will evolve with that change. How they write their experiences or advice will need to shift. “Mummy bloggers” are SO much more than mummy’s who blog, I don’t think it was the right was to describe them in a vulnerable situation, but understand it’s an industry term. They are value creators, trusted mentors and influencers, this will never die, brands need real people talking about their products. Perhaps Mia’s words weren’t the best way to say things, this is an opportunity to evolve. When we all started blogging it was an opportunity to add value and do something different. Keep seeking that opportunity to do something different. It’s how we thrive.