William Jacobsen's story is nice, it really is. It's the perfect "started from the bottom" kind of scenario that any blog provider would want under their belt. Legal Insurrection went from a fledgling website to a thriving, political beast, and understandably that history is going to inspire a slew of hopeful bloggers — and I don't really suspect it to help any of them.
When Legal Insurrection opened, in 2008, David Karp's nifty "Tumblr" idea was barely in full form. Pinterest wouldn't show up for another 2 years. April of 2008 also marked Facebook's inevitable triumph over Myspace. Consider this context: microblogging, or blogging for that matter was not yet streamlines and pretty, as it is now, while an entire audience of social-media-zens is displaced from one outlet to another.
It would seem to me that at this very moment, it would be like "buying shares early." I am aware that blogs may have inhabited the net for a long while before this — instead, I want to highlight the focus on them, and their accessibility. People were learning about blogs — young people and young adults, mostly — and wanted to read them.
But now? Everyone and their mother has a blog. You could make twenty Tumblrs in a day, or hop on Squarespace: having one's own page is not rare anymore. Rather, it's as simple as any other commodity on the internet.
What results from this is an unbelievably saturated market, where the odds of a blog crawling up from the depths to prominence is far more difficult than it ever was before. So for students to think that they may be able to re-create the rapid growth that Jacobsen experience seems entirely unrealistic.
However, this isn't to say there isn't a nice morsel of advice in between the lines — Jacobsen didn't make a blog. He made something new. The next Legal Insurrection isn't going to be a blog. It won't be a Tumblr. It'll be a Roomblr or some other arbitrary term. Often I see people poised to follow in the steps of other bloggers — they promote their Facebook pages, and boast over their Instagrams in the hopes of more followers, and more notice. But no one can spot a user when there's 3 million others doing it.
Success is adaptive. It's fast. And most importantly, it's very, very current. And if we are to be successful, we can't make the next blog. There is no next blog.
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