Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in January 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
By early 2005, a list of predictions about the future of blogging had become widespread enough to spark conversation in the early blogosphere. The original version of this article shared ten predictions published here on January 1st of that year.
It is worth returning to that list after twenty years. Not for nostalgia’s sake, but because forecast lists are one of the few honest records of how the industry understood itself at a given moment. When you read them decades later, the gap between what people expected and what actually happened tells you something real about how platforms have evolved, how power has consolidated, and how creators continue to be wrong about the future.
Some of the 2005 predictions were surprisingly accurate. Others were completely absent. And a few were right in spirit but wrong in every specific detail—perhaps the most instructive category of all.
Well aged predictions
Even if the mechanism turned out to be very different from what anyone expected, the prediction that blog advertising would skyrocket was correct. In 2005, the assumption was that blog-specific ad networks would proliferate and compete. What actually happened was consolidation: Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the eventual near-total dominance of Google AdSense and later the Facebook Ads ecosystem reshaped the way bloggers made money. The boom happened. Diversity did not.
The prediction of getting better blogs also came true. What was unexpected about the 2005 list was the scale. In the late 2000s and into the 2010s, AOL spent hundreds of millions acquiring blog networks. Demand Media, About.com, and finally HuffPost in 2005 reached seemingly absurd numbers. This trend has continued into the 2020s with newsletters and YouTube channels – the specific medium has changed, but the basic logic has remained.
Perhaps the most advanced prediction was related to the pooling of resources and blog networks. Jason Calacanis’s Weblogs Inc. the company was already proving the model. What followed—Gawker Media, Vox Media, BuzzFeed, and finally the Substack network model—proved his instinct right. Creators will seek leverage through collective infrastructure, even if the specific form of that infrastructure continues to change.
Missed predictions and why it matters
The Yahoo/TypePad acquisition never happened. Yahoo finally got more serious into blogging when it acquired Tumblr in 2013. for $1.1 billion — but it was too late to matter, and integration was widely considered a failure. TypePad, the platform behind Six Apart, never became a mainstream consumer product. Six Apart itself was broken up and sold piecemeal.
The prediction that an Association of Bloggers would be formed to represent bloggers has not materialized in any meaningful way. It’s worth sitting with. The instinct that bloggers needed collective representation to navigate ethics debates, platform relationships, and public perception was a healthy one. But the structure never comes together. Today, advocacy for creators is fragmented between platform-specific communities, union efforts in adjacent industries, and individual influencers with audiences large enough to define their own terms. There is still no unified voice for independent content creators, and this lack has real consequences.
The prediction that blogs would get their own TV show is technically true—various web-to-TV crossovers happened over the next decade—but the frame reveals something about how the medium was conceived at the time. It was assumed that legitimacy would transfer from the old media to the new. What actually happened was the opposite: audiences moved away, and traditional television spent the next fifteen years trying to figure out why.
What the platform consolidation story actually looks like
A deeper pattern running through most of these predictions is a misreading of how platform power will be concentrated. In 2005, the blogosphere still felt truly distributed. Blogads, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type — there were many competing ecosystems, and it was unclear which, if any, would prevail.
What followed was consolidation that reshaped the entire content landscape. Facebook’s algorithm changes in the mid-2010s could single-handedly make or break a publisher’s traffic. We’ve seen a systematic decline in independent digital publishers over this period. WordPress remained the only open platform at scale – today it’s going strong 43% of all sites — but even WordPress-based publishers found themselves dependent on Google for discovery and Facebook for distribution.
The lesson is not that platforms are bad. It’s a structural weakness of any platform dependency that independent creators have consistently underestimated—and the 2005 predictions, like most predictions of the time, didn’t quite pan out.
Scam blog prediction: early warning, slow response
One prediction from the 2005 list that deserves more credit than it usually gets is a warning about scam blogs. The concern was that spammers and bad actors would create fake blogs and services that would threaten the credibility of the media as a whole.
It happened and it was bad. Splogs—spam blogs—proliferated in 2005 and 2006, playing with Google’s link algorithms and directly contributing to the SEO arms race that shaped content strategy for the next decade. The worry that “the actions of a few will continue to reverberate across the board” proved true: the association between blogging and low-quality content continued into the 2010s, even for serious publishers.
Today’s equivalent – AI-generated content farms, link schemes and parasitic SEO – is a direct descendant of that dynamic. Google’s Useful Content updates As of 2022, it was in part a belated attempt to solve what seemed like a problem two decades ago.
Here’s what a forecast list from 2005 can still teach you
What surprises me the most when I read these predictions now is not how wrong they were about the specifics, but how right they were about the pressures. The tension between independent creators and big platforms, the question of whether bloggers will ever have collective influence, the threat of low-quality content to media credibility—these are not 2005 issues. They are simply structural features of the content economy that have taken different forms over time.
A useful habit is not to predict correctly. It’s about identifying the key forces—platform dependency, quality reduction, consolidation, and distribution—and building your publishing strategy around those forces, not around the specific tools that currently dominate.
From 2005 to the present, the creators share one quality in common: they have never confused the platform with the audience. The platform is changing. Audiences may follow you elsewhere if you’ve built genuine trust with them.
It’s a lesson that the 2005 predictions are already circling, even if they can’t say it outright. It is more relevant now than ever.
