Erica Scott’s Spanking Blog Goodbye
There aren’t many spanking blogs left any more, and I don’t have a lot of room to complain about that; my own spanking blog (this one here) which was possibly the first such, isn’t “all that” these days. My updates stay fairly regular, but most of the time this is just image-blogging that would be more efficiently done (and to a bigger audience) on Tumblr. I’m stubborn, though, and I’m not running out (at least not yet) of the increasingly-hard-to-find spanking images that can catch my eye and tickle my fancy. Anyway, Erica Scott was for many years a die-hard spanking blogger like me, but she’s finally hung up her hat and thrown in the towel. On her way out the door, she wrote an interesting recap of the evolution of online spanking communities that I think is worth sharing, as were many of her other posts over the years:
I have been in the spanking scene for twenty-one years this month, and online for nineteen. I have watched many changes in what became known as social media. In the early days for spanking chat and exploration, there were what was known as newsgroups, and various chat rooms. Often the latter devolved into a bunch of silly cyber spanking, but one could find intelligent conversation if one looked carefully. Then, around 2000, give or take a year, those gave way to chat forums, such as those on MSN and Yahoo, the old Shadow Lane chat board, etc. People posted and chatted and shared and connected. I co-managed a successful forum for a few years and had a blast.
When the forums began to run their course, they were overtaken by a new phenomenon: the spanking blog. Soon, everyone and their second cousin twice removed was blogging. I joined this bandwagon in 2005, on what used to be the hopping place (!): MySpace. My blog there straggled along for a while, trying to find its audience, but there was so much competition. But then two things happened. One, I was listed by our blog queen, Bonnie, who made a point of spotlighting new blogs in her “In With the New” column. Things really picked up for me after that, but I still had a second holy grail to achieve. The buzz in the blogosphere was about a gentleman who went by the name of Chross, who had a weekly list of what he considered the most notable blog posts. If one was lucky enough to be “Chrossed,” they would be treated to a highly gratifying spike in blog hits. But how did one get on Chross’s radar, I wondered? I finally grew so frustrated that I wrote a post called “Who Do I Have to @#$% to Get on Chross’s List?” Apparently, that got his attention. 🙂
After that, wow. Views, comments, etc. skyrocketed. Until MySpace died, and I took the plunge and started a new blog on Blogger in 2010. I flourished there for years, getting Chrossed often, sharing adventures and party stories and photos and scenes and video shoots, as well as bits and pieces of my personal life. When Blogger threatened to censor or shut down all their “adult” blogs, I migrated to WordPress. Turns out it wasn’t necessary, since Blogger backed off, but I don’t regret it.
However, things changed yet again. Slowly but surely, the spanking blog was overtaken by the Tumblr blogs: pictures. Lots and lots and lots of pictures. The lengthy blog entry morphed into quickie sound bites, gifs and jpegs. Comments became likes and reposts. The spanking models, who all used to blog, now opened Tumblr accounts. Twitter came to be, and now, instead of writing party and shoot reports, people tweeted the action as it was happening. There were some exceptions who maintained their popularity (Hermione and Ronnie come to mind, as well as some of the DD/Hoh blogs and some author blogs) but it seemed that overall, the traditional written spanking blog had gone the way of the VCR and the variety show.
I myself am not quite ready to put a fork in the spanking blog concept and declare it done, but I agree it’s a pale shadow of what it once was. Adult websites in general are struggling these days if they aren’t large and corporate; between Google demoting them in search rankings, mainstream social media (like FaceBook) prohibiting their links and participation, and people in general spending less time “on the web” and more time in various social media networks that are all hostile to adult content, it’s like trying to grow vegetables without irrigation. Sometimes a bit of rain will fall, and stuff doesn’t quite die, but there’s never a bumper crop of traffic, attention, or participation. Ask any dryland farmer how that story ends: some bad year after a string of bad years you just say “fuckit” and stop planting.
I’ll miss Erica’s blog like I miss a long string of people who gave up sooner than she did. Thanks, Erica, for all the good years!
