Claudia Felix-Garay, who runs the blog the Penny Closet out of Los Angeles, has said she earns up to $1,000 to $3,000 per product-placement campaign. Through my previous partnership with Big Lots, I found out that they offer all kinds of deals and stock tons of holiday décor at great prices, so we headed there to find a few new things to spruce up the place." Sample: "One of the most exciting things we do as a family though, is decorate our home for Christmas. The result is blogs like Jessica Shyba's Momma's Gone City, where photos are the main event and the writing seems to exist solely to sell stuff. Some affiliate programs such as RewardStyle pay when readers click on their links. Companies send influencers free products they might recommend, sponsor giveaways and pay for posts. Over time, mom bloggers, with their thousands of followers, became enormously influential, and, as with athletes and other celebrities, their endorsements became valuable to marketers. "Advertising got a foothold and started having more and more say in things," Armstrong says. "You can't taste it after a while, but you keep eating it."įinancial interests also clearly shape how people tell stories on the mom Internet now. "How many macarons can you look at? How much latte art can you consume? How many photos of babies in the cloth diaper on the minimalist kitchen counter can you see? It's visual Cheetos," she says. And then there are those like the Shyba family, who shot to fame after staging photos of their puppy napping with their baby.īunmi Laditan, the woman behind the popular Twitter feed turned book "The Honest Toddler," says there are funny, authentic and interesting moms on those platforms, but there's also a trendy sameness to much of the content. Meanwhile, some of the mom brands of today's Internet operate in a niche, such as fitness, food, card-making or even calligraphy. The personal-essay industry has absorbed some of the fare that used to appear on mom blogs, but reading a viral post that shows up in your Facebook feed is very different from following a particular blogger. Mom bloggers "used to be able to easily reach their audience through search, RSS feeds or newsletter updates," notes Elizabeth Tenety, a former Washington Post colleague who co-founded the website Motherly, "but now that their core audience is trending towards hanging out on their phones - and by extension social media sites like Instagram and Facebook - the digital environment overall is less of a fit for those types of blogs." The shift to shorter posts and an emphasis on likes and hearts has changed the tone and content of what moms find online: more pictures, fewer words, less grit. Some bloggers use social networks to push people to their websites, but more and more, Instagram or Facebook is the destination. By 7 a.m., 56 percent of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile devices. In 2016, Facebook (which owns Instagram) reported that new parents are especially active "in the wee hours," starting their first mobile visits as early as 4 a.m. And parents with young children have made the transition along with everyone else - although their hours are somewhat more erratic. Blogging on the whole has fizzled as audiences and writers have moved to other platforms. The death of the mom blog has something to do with shifts in how people consume and create on the Internet. And Instagram is built for beauty (its filters make your life look better), not for rawness. The Facebook groups centered on transactional tips - I need advice or a product, so let's exchange ideas or baby gear - and rarely featured those journal-like entries of the earlier mom blogs. Social media doesn't nurture the authenticity and community I craved from the Internet as a new mom. You will survive."īut instead, as I thumbed the screen of my phone during what felt like never-ending hours of breast-feeding, I found trips to Greece and carefully arranged living rooms. During the tough moments, I wanted a mommy blogger's reassurance: "I've been there. I wanted to read the stories of people sharing my experience. Members of my church brought meals, my girlfriends and sisters shared war stories over group texts, and my Facebook group of moms answered modern questions, such as "How do you organize all the digital photos of your baby?" Still, I wanted something more. I felt both #blessed and sometimes quite lonely. My daughter's first giggles made me cry, as did her first blowout diaper. For me, the first few months of motherhood in 2016 were - as they are for many women - elating and discouraging.
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