Well, I'm not seeing so much a drop in readers so much as a drop in people who have to post just so they can say they did. I suspect they went over to Facebook to drop more idiot polls and memes all over the place, and let 'em have it.
As for actual blog readership, I was expecting this for a while. You have the triple whammy of the number of readers stabilizing, the number of readers of early implementers who decided that they wanted to get some of the attention as well, and a general migration to Twitter and other ADD enablers. I watched the same exact shakeout with personal Web sites and zines in the mid-Nineties, with the same panic from editors and Webmasters about how a lack of immediate comments somehow meant that they weren't being read. I'm actually appreciative of the shakeout, because this means that the people who leave comments actually have something to say. The idiots are increasingly on Twitter, or they're defecating into newspaper comment boards.
no subject
As for actual blog readership, I was expecting this for a while. You have the triple whammy of the number of readers stabilizing, the number of readers of early implementers who decided that they wanted to get some of the attention as well, and a general migration to Twitter and other ADD enablers. I watched the same exact shakeout with personal Web sites and zines in the mid-Nineties, with the same panic from editors and Webmasters about how a lack of immediate comments somehow meant that they weren't being read. I'm actually appreciative of the shakeout, because this means that the people who leave comments actually have something to say. The idiots are increasingly on Twitter, or they're defecating into newspaper comment boards.