My thoughts on the Nigerian blogosphere

‘You won’t believe what Don Jazzy had for breakfast’, ‘OMG! You need to see what Nadia Buhari wore yesterday night’, ‘D’banj and Wizkid fought at one awards yesterday, click here for pictures’. These and many more are the kind of stuff we see from Nigerian bloggers on a daily basis. Actually, the use of clickbait is rampant across the world, and deserves a separate post in all regards, but that’s a battle for another day fellas. So, let’s continue our journey into the writing style of Nigerian bloggers. Honestly, don’t know if I would categorize it as a writing style, but its let’s just consider it a style.

It all began with AdSense. It was meant to be good, you know, allow content creators get monetary rewards for putting awesome stuff on the internet. Then, it went haywire along the line. I’m not much of a history expert in our blogosphere, but everything seemed to start with someone called Linda Ikeji. People saw how much money she was making,and it was as if something big hit them, and they realized that they could also make money from blogging. There was just one major problem — they weren’t actually creating content. No. They were copying and pasting content. And it got boring, really fast. You could wake up to a flurry of messages on social media asking you to visit their sites to see some odd stuff that didn’t just interest you, or entertainment news that you barely cared about, and this was spread across most of the blogs.

But there was one slight problem — nobody seemed to be making as much money as they would have liked to, maybe weren’t even making money at all, but that didn’t stop them from spilling out the same bland kind of content. They kept having that, ‘we’ll surely hit the mother-load one day’. Let’s just consider for one moment that there were only a 100 bloggers in a city, sharing the same blog posts, copied from the same sources, what would drive readers to visit them? You could get the information from their source, and deny them the traffic they crave for, which would yield little or no revenue for them, push them to keep spamming us on social media, and heck, we’d be stuck in this conundrum that we just can’t seem to get out of, all because guys won’t just seat down and start creating their own content.

You’d be shocked at the amount of people that would stop ‘blogging’ if Google ever decided to shutdown AdSense, o if they found out they couldn’t make money from it again. At this point, it would seem that I’m trying to blame it all on AdSense. I wouldn’t. I love Google. I’m just trying to say that people should learn to create their own contents. It could be on anything, anything thing at all that interests you, but let it be unique, have a style reminiscent of you, and not all the cliche stuff we’ve gotten used to. Nobody would stop you from using AdSense, but your readers would be coming across fresh content, and after a while, you’d have gained your own followers, so it’s a win — win.

So please people, whenever you see someone claiming to be a blogger in Nigeria, with ‘copied and pasted’ content, grab the person by the collar, and make them give you fresh content. You deserve fresh content. Let’s start pushing more uniquely styled blogs and improving our blogosphere.