It seems to be a growing trend in other avenues of communicating scholarship. For example, there are too many journals, conferences, blogs, podcasts, degrees etc.

There are so many now that it's a strong hypothesis to say the quality of the median conference, journal, blog, podcast etc have really declined over the years.

I think that as the number of these channels begin to grow, the branding will become increasingly important to separate the good from the bad because there are too many to evaluate them all thoroughly.