Decor Bloggers Complain of Burnout, Embrace 'Slow Blogging'

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The New York Times has called it: Blogger burnout is plaguing the DIY blogosphere. Prompted by Young House Love, which is calling it quits for an indeterminate amount of time, reporter Steven Kurutz searched the DIY blogging community to see if others were also at the end of their rope. He found that some bloggers had started to embrace the idea of slow blogging and a more thought-out approach to sponsorships and advertising.

"If readers begin to suspect that your content is heavy on product placement, if they see excessive amounts of sponsored posts, you risk losing what's most important, which is trust and authenticity," Pam Kueber, the blogger behind Retro Renovation, told Kurutz. On the other hand, readers are constantly clamoring for more content. She warned that bloggers had to be mindful of not letting the internet consume them.

"Right now, our home is a disaster of props because we had four photo shoots this week," Brittany Watson Jepsen, the writer behind The House That Lars Built, told Kurutz. "Tuesday night I just sat there and I couldn't move. This is the week of burnout." She likened house renovation to being "worse than having kids" and doesn't blame the couple behind Young House Love for taking a step back.

But many bloggers have trouble conveying their stress to their readers. "I think there's a fear that if we post less, our readers will find that content elsewhere," Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind told Kurutz. "And yet many bloggers don't want to complain for fear of sounding whiny or ungrateful."

At the end of the day, the slow blogging approach might be the only way to keep certain blogs sustainable. "The very aspects that fueled [Young House Love's] success—their machinelike content-generation, the close personal engagement with readers that bordered on oversharing, the romance of being a husband-and-wife D.I.Y. blogging team—may turn out to be the things that make continuing the blog in its current form impossible," writes Kurutz.
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