I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?
Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.
But I think the internet in general is moving away from bespoke, homebrew content. This is very visible even on HN, where the daily line-up contains corporate and university press releases + newspaper articles about as often as it contains personal blogs.
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices
This needs to be repeated ad nauseum on HN.
For most people (especially those not working in jobs which require heavy amounts of writing, analysis, and reading), text is NOT the default method with which they interact and communicate information.
TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.
Why does it need to be repeated? It is clear enough that the blogging era was a bit of an atypical period, that much is true; but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives? Yes, in reality it’s partly VC News, but the mandate is intellectual curiosity, which most people have had beaten out of them by the time they were fourteen. Some amount of disdain for what most people end up doing by default, for what’s normal, etc., is absolutely instrumental to not having that happen to you.
(For what little it’s worth, and in the spirit of aforementioned curiosity: nausea gives you ad nauseam; with some caveats, a Latin noun in the singular governed by the preposition ad gets the ending -m while retaining the final vowel of its stem.)
Even most of my nerd friends are consuming less and less longform text. It has been years now since budding hackers can pick up their coding skills through YT videos and now TikTok, and suggesting they read through longform documentation or an OReilly book just makes one look out of touch. HN's audience is as susceptible to the trend the GP mentions as anyone else.
I'm currently learning electronics, as well as having just recently sat my Physics/Math finals. I can tell you with 100% certainty you CAN'T learn shit from /just/ video.
Actual learning requires you to think about what you just read, maybe re-read it multiple times, stop to try and solve a example problem, etc - all of which require you to stop/rewind which video inherently disfavors.
Besides, I think just like handwritten notes might have a slightly different neurological effect than typed ones, reading might just be a very different mental muscle more connected to comprehension; humans had oral language for much longer than any script, so maybe it came with some different connections to higher brain structures as well.
I prefer to separate it as "casual learning/curiosity" and "intentional learning" rather than something so crass. I'd admit to being an enjoyer of both, I have no dreams or illusions about me becoming civil engineer or city planner just because I like watching those sort of videos, even though they're informative as well as mostly just entertainment with unreliable narrators.
As long as you're conscious about what mode you're in (which to be fair, many probably aren't), I think it's fine.
Well, I was talking about myself. I used to learn mostly through videos, but I often struggled to apply what I'd watched. Over time, I realized I learn best by reading, writing, and actually putting things into practice, rather than passively consuming videos. Videos often gave me the illusion that I was learning, but later I'd have trouble recalling or using what I'd learned. I don't have that problem with text.
I’ll say this with certainty, video is terrible reference material.
Talk me through something the first time, sure, but if I need to look something up (yes, I know asking an LLM is available) I want a comprehensive subject guide, mostly in text, searchable by actual keywords.
I think parent is trying to make the point that yes, for you video is a terrible reference material. For me too, but some people do keep links to videos and look up things that way, as surprising and counter-intuitive (to us) that may be.
You could compare performance on a timed exam between access to YouTube or to an open textbook. It really isn’t a generational vibe thing. They are different mediums.
Nobody said they do that though? Weird comment from my perspective.
They said they learn from them, not that they are effective references. I’m not buying the “us and them” or to each their own on this one, sight unseen. Do you have an example?
I mean of course you can go back to a point in time in a video, if you index a transcript and ignore the weird narration and wait through the typing sounds, OCR whatever comes up on the screen to copy and paste and need animations to be reminded you are supposed to pay attention, and you are aligned with the video feed algorithm.
> but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives?
Well, when the question is "why did the blogs go away" the answer might be difficult to investigate by only considering a narrow slice of the potential audience for said blogs.
>TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.
That's not exactly neutral though, but part of a larger theme of regression from literacy to a visual and oral culture (and a dopamine seeking junky one).
Alright I'll bite: What are you getting out of skimming through what is widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time? General plot points? That can be accomplished with a readthrough of the SparkNotes.
Well, I might have been too harsh. Listening is better than "skimming". It is actually slower, so you're retaining more.
>greatest novels of all time
I was forced to read it at high school, finished about a quarter, didn't enjoy it a slightest bit, and managed to sabotage the rest of the reading successfully.
Many people told me that the book just wasn't fit for my age and maturity level, so I promised myself to re-read it as an adult. Now I am executing this plan.
I am still not impressed. Of course, the language is much better than what youtubers are speaking in, so listening is more pleasurable, but overall the book is underwhelming.
Dostoyevskiy himself admitted that the book is a merger of two drafts, none of which he managed to complete on its own, and indeed it feels like that.
The first component (which had been called "Drunkards" before the merger) is about the life of alcoholics. I cannot really reflect, since I never drank any alcohol at all. Perhaps it could teach me how to deal with them, but so far the most conclusion I have drawn is just "avoid".
The second component is a so-so detective story. It could have been better, if the protagonist hadn't been clearly mentally unwell. You know, any plot involving insane people is not really worth reading, because admitting that your character is a madman is basically saying "his motivations are not what real people have". Any question of the form "why did he do X", are immediately answered with "because he is a madman". Okay, fine, now what about actually describing real human behaviour?
>That can be accomplished with a read-through of the SparkNotes
No, not really. I can feel it quite well when something like this can be accomplished. Sometimes I start listening to a book, only to find out that listening doesn't work, I _need_ to see the words in order to understand what is going on. This happened more than once, so I am confident that it's not an exception.
This appears to be true for a plurality, or maybe just barely a majority of people.
I don't find audio so easily multi-tasks, unless we're using different definitions. My example: I find it very difficult to do something described in an audio or video format - rewire a light switch, say. I find it way easier to have text with a diagram. I can stop and check the text at any time. I find it easier to go back to previous sentences, than to rewind an audio or video.
When i say multitask I mean that more literally. If you’re driving you can’t read, if you’re a passenger on public transit audio won’t make you motion sick, if you are cooking or cleaning you can have it on in the background, etc.
Reading requires the full use of your eyes, no way around that.
Fair enough - we have different definitions. If I have audio on while driving or cooking or cleaning, I can only half listen, I miss a lot. I have to be very careful with what I listen to while driving, lest it take my attention away from the road, so I only half agree with you.
The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.
Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.
>The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.
Not as "fine working" as a book or a magazine or even a PC - not with 10 other districtions available in the form of different apps (and sending notifications), and not with that small of a screen.
Your post is a red herring, some platforms simply replaced bespoke blogging websites. How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media.
> consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media
I beg to differ. Follow 12 “people” on Insta and you’re just telling the algorithm you’re into parent stuff, or fashion, or makeup, or cars, or attractive women, or attractive men. It’s not like even 50% of what they serve you will BE those 12 people you followed. Most of what you get will be related to the same niches, but it’ll be from randos and AI instead.
It’s nothing like how simple RSS, Google Reader, or even Flipboard in its original iteration, made it to follow a bunch of specific “creators.”
It does not require a "service" to consume multiple blogs efficiently, just simply "software" (an app will do).
The below RSS readers pretty much do their job and get out of the user's way. What's amazing is the sheer number of RSS readers that people choose to use; there are so many, people find ones that they personally like.
None of that matters since instagram has more users etc. Jesus, the question is "why blogs disappear" - they disappear because users don't care about the value proposition of your RSS app. Most of them are quite shit anyway - little commonality in terms of styling etc.
The question was "How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today?"
You can do that with RSS.
Now you are saying it doesn't matter because everyone is on Instagram. So you aren't consuming "multiple blogs" in the first place, you're just consuming multiple Instagram accounts.
Keep in mind that nothing stops Instagram from providing RSS feeds for each user account.
You could literally just tell people to stop using Instagram and use Tumblr instead and the problem would solve itself. Tumblr hosts photos, photos albums, and videos, including blogs of several photographers. Tumblr has RSS feeds for each blog. You don't need to have a Tumblr account to follow blogs on Tumblr, you can just put them all into your RSS app and be done. You don't even need a separate RSS app. Vivaldi, a web browser, has an RSS client built-in.
Reddit has RSS feeds. Youtube has RSS feeds. Wordpress has RSS feeds (this is 50% of blogs, essentially). Mastodon has RSS feeds. Bluesky has RSS feeds.
There is nothing that we can do if people deliberately choose to go into a walled garden, but the open gardens still existand you have the full ability to use those instead.
Maybe if more people understood the value proposition of RSS's, they would have more reason to stop using Instagram and move.
> If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on.
This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%.
"People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on?
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money
i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?
> I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years.
This sort of blanket assumption is exactly what the parent is arguing against. The mortality rate of top-n things is relatively easy to measure, and should be baselined first. Then we can compare recent performance vs historical performance, and actually say if something has changed. There's no need to start with the assumption "not much changes over 5 years" -- it can be measured instead.
>I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?
It's still interesting to see that "top 100" hugely succesful blogs can go so much down, even if it's "natural churn".
Then there's the fact that blogs in the "Top 100" are big business (money wise), often established for a decade or more, and have enough subscribers/viewers to spare. So unlikely to just be "dead" in n+5, just declining (which this tracks).
>Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.
So? That's an explanation for the drop. The post tracks the drop itself.
Everyone removed their blogroll. That is what happened. Someone gave Automattic (WordPress foundation that could receive "donations" from advertising platforms) the idea that making blogs mostly discoverable via paid advertising was a good idea. Automattic removed the blogroll by default, and then most of the blogs removed, and then most of the blogs vanished. Blogs were discovered via the huge list of other blogs. There were so many incredible blogs. One could then check all their linked blogroll blogs because birds of a feather flocked together...
Automatic became an NGO. A big advertising seller paid the NGO lots of money. The NGO removed blogrolls so that blogs were discoverable by paid advertising instead of word of mouth. Countless blogs also removed their blogrolls, and blogging declined.
That is one more thing that Google has done to destroy the web that gave birth to it. That happened around 2012.
Also, old blogs were like having a subject matter expert as your personal mentor via correspondence. Those new blogs would have been called content farms in the days of the blogroll. Search back then was based on keywords and boolean. You could type "NOT youtube" and no youtube would fill your results. The top blogs are content farms by the old standards.
Google removed the ability to use boolean search to get exactly what you want based on text content, and then they removed the blogrolls via bankrolling the WordPress developers. Now the top content farmers get top billing on every search engine, which requires marketing spend, the blogrolls are niche structures, and you cannot boolean your way to a real set of search results.
Blog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good.
But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.
It’s always “safe to ignore” a blog because there’s seldom actual negative consequences for doing so. If you want to use such a silly, absurd heuristic, feel free to pay the opportunity cost. Pointless nostalgia-driven web surfing at its finest.
You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French).
So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happy writing my ideas/thoughts down, for me.
I think it is very good and healthy to not care too much about readership numbers, but you seem pretty high on your pedestal here - you still publish it to the public, you still seek an audience. If you’re doing it just for you, then why are you hosting a blog For the world to see? Surely there is some part of you that wants people to read it, otherwise you wouldn’t, right?
Just knowing that people could read my blog is forcing me to take better care of my writing. This is the most important reason. And only my friends and family know the address, it is not indexed :-D
Yes, but this is not the one where I wrote about politics, life and society... still, the writing style is not that different, so, I suppose an AI system would be able to easily associate my crappy personal blog to me (not sure if they are respecting the noindex stuff the way Google does) and build a profile of my personality out of it.
Note: Interestingly, seeing my full name here is not something I expected.
I apologise for this, the real terrifying thing that it took me 1 minute and one shot prompt on Grok to get all this – and a lot more. Just check yourself. We all are heavily royally f...d, my firend. (I found similar level of details about myself too)
Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc.
For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible even if nobody but me cares or uses them.
I have a wiki for that, but I keep reading the Arbiters of the Internet around here claim wikis are even deader than personal blogs, so what do I know. :-)
It's on a public IP, but isn't open to public users. I don't personally think 'the place I scribble stuff I want to remember down the road' is a blog, but I'm equally uninterested in arguing a distinction I don't think much matters. I don't know what you mean by 'extra step' unless you mean 'loging in', which is a hurdle I assume I'd have to jump over if I was posting a blog entry.
I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.
Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
What happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left.
That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.
I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc.
(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)
Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.
RMS wasn't "cancelled" (a reminder that "canceling" and "canceled" is a snarl word.)
His decades of incredibly shitty behavior came to be more public knowledge as both men and women in CS realized the behavior they'd witnessed wasn't some outlier once a few women who were well-known came forward and disclosed his behavior.
What brought it all to bear was him repeatedly, on a technical mailing lists, defending sex with underage girls, which in turn led people to actually go looking through material on his own site where he pontificated that sex with anyone over 14 should be legal, or even younger. These are his exact own words:
"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
Add onto that decades of stories of creepy, manipulating, harassing behavior toward girls/women as well as incredibly sexist comments about women's technical abilities...among a lot of other really anti-social behavior, like an apparent refusal to bathe...while expecting anyone who hosts him to read a 40 page long missive about exactly how treat him.
One of the smartest things reddit ever did was ensure old.reddit.com remains fully functional. I imagine one day they'll EOL it, and when they do I'll no longer be a reddit user (probably not really a bad thing).
Even if Old Reddit still exists, the vast majority of users are on New Reddit or the app on their phones. Those are designed to keep people endlessly scrolling, not sticking around in any one place and building community. Also, the phone as default device has reduced comments to 140-character quips, and one looks like a real weirdo now if one writes a solid paragraph or two like in the old days.
Well, it's kinda surprising that Digg actually followed the Slashdot playbook (Slashdot fucked up first) - Digg should have at least learned something from Slashdot's mistake.
Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.
I had the same blog post get on HN and on Slashdot. HN link didn't get to the front page, got about 25 human visits. The link on Slashdot got the blog post 2500 visits, plus the Slashdot IP addresses visited tons of other posts and content on my web site. Maybe places don't get "slashdotted" any more, but a link on Slashdot seemingly gets you a ton more visits than a link on HN.
Also, Slashdot visitors use more MacOS and Linux than Windows. The reverse is true of the small number of HN visitors.
If you gave me one of the "100 Successful Blogs" without framing it as a "successful blog", I would not say "this is a successful blog". The 5 or so I looked at all seemed very similar, like they were part of an MLM scheme, and had uninteresting content. I did not recognize a single one of the 100.
If you imagine Google's job is to present useful information, these blogs that are maximizing cash while simulating usefulness are exactly the sorts of things I would hope Google to want to filter out.
(I don't think Google's often capricious ranking changes really succeed at this, but the outcomes in this post seems like something hypothetically good?)
This whole thing is a pretty fascinating insight into a whole other corner of the internet ecosystem:
> For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog."
Then:
> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable. [...] If you tried to start a blog between roughly 2015 and 2022, most probably you read blog income reports as they were the proof of concept and held up to a generation of aspiring small publishers as this is what winning looks like, and you can do it too.
It's the blog/SEO equivalent of today's TikTok influencer culture.
There was a pretty small slice of bloggers like Michael Arrington who really put in a lot of time and created a brand/company that did pretty well off blogging (for a time). But blogging then and now is pretty much a side-gig for a lot of people that doesn't bring in much money. Which is fine. But social media, which has itself contracted, has cut into a lot of that.
I did start a blog in that time period and this is the first time I've ever heard of this. (Admittedly, I wasn't trying to directly make a living off of it.)
If I write a detailed explanation of some industrial electrical detail in some electrician forum, perhaps one or two people will upvote it. If I write some very general, snarky comment in a general forum, I'll get hundreds to thousands of upvotes. Blogs are the same. An excellent niche blog might churn along for many years, but few will ever know it exists, and it won't get on one of these surveys. A clever, popular blog, written to get big quickly, and heavily promoted by the author, will get on all the lists. And most of them won't last five years.
No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.
There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).
Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
Blogs are already dying and basically dont exist outside few platforms favored by search engines.
People are way less likely tondo pointless thing.
> People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
>People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
People weren't always writing blogs because the term and associated platforms hadn't always existed but people were always writing, often about themselves, and BBSs and personal websites served the purpose that blogs later would online.
Blogs and search engines happened to arrive on the web at almost the same time and evolved in parallel. The vast majority of early blogs were written without any visibility on search engines much less any viewers. It's difficult to imagine in the modern day but people used to do things because they wanted to, not to maximize commercial interest or fame. Search engines helped the popularity of blogs, but weren't the catalyst so much as the existence of services like Blogger and Livejournal. What killed blogs wasn't google but social media. But people kept writing on social media in much the same way that they did on blogs. The medium changed but the desire for self expression didn't. We just call blogs feeds now but it's more or less the same thing.
Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.
Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.
You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.
The fact that now only substack blogs survived is result of the exact process I am talking about - search engine not returning smaller platforms and those blogs dying.
> You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.
I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?
Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.
I’m curious why many tech bloggers choose Substack, when it’s almost trivial to set up your own blog with infinitely more style control, and math/syntax-highlighting etc.
Substack handles emailing and payments well. Many people want to receive posts by email, which is a pain to do on your own with high deliverability. Some are willing to pay for it, and payments are similarly annoying (and benefit from a familiar interface, which Substack now provides).
Substack, Medium, Tumblr, etc. absorbed a lot of the blogging crowd. And of course we have hordes of people throwing AI slop at each other on Linkedin. Tumblr and Medium are of course a bit past their prime at this point. That's what happens to VC funded companies after they fail to take over the world. Might happen to Substack as well.
Add to that Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc. and you have a very fragmented space of people exchanging content at each other.
It's not so much that blogging is dead but that it got overtaken by other platforms that aren't necessarily much better. And the fragmentation hurts distribution. And commercialization, injects a lot of bad incentives into the whole space that rewards people that are mostly just very loud and uninteresting.
A lot of the blogging tools still work fine. It's not that hard to accumulate lists of interesting RSS feeds. Mastodon actually has RSS feeds, BTW. It can double as a blogging platform.
It's just that it all competes for attention and some people are a bit too loud. At this point, the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible for an unfiltered list of blogs these days. That was fine when people moderated themselves. But now that they don't, it's hard to filter out all the noise. And the commercial algorithms don't help much as they tend to favor click bait rather than substance.
Given the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not.
I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.
Understood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword.
All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.
I consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place. You could literally listen to a different song from a different artist for the rest of your life. The industry is saturated.
In 2020, I was getting an insane amount of visitors from Google on my blog. Today, Google doesn't bring more than a hundred a day. Yet search impressions are higher than ever. It felt like a failure on my part, but then we always talk about the small web and what happens when the websites become two commercial. Despite the thousands of AI blogs that regurgitate whatever gets posted on HN, we get to read so many good small blogs right here. Blogging is still a fun practice, and I encourage people to do it, even it's only to help them refine the ideas in their mind.
As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.
But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.
There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.
The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?
>But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.
This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.
Same sentiment here. B-tier hit factory stuff is easy to catch and easier to ignore and move on from. Also happy to recognize a fellow Stevie Wonder fan.
In the age of AI, interchangeable content farms that earn pennies by filling 80% of the screen with ads are dead. In fact, the user hostility of those "blogs" is what pushes people even further towards AI interfaces that output what matters up top and (for now) without ads.
Blogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago.
There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the terse blog posts that dominated 1-2 decades ago. Even major media sources such as the NY Times The Atlantic are copying the substack contrarian style that is thriving now.
Substack blogging is very different from old-school blogging. The Substack culture puts much more emphasis on writing daily in order to maintain engagement, and to closely target those daily posts to a market that will open its wallets. And not necessarily because that market is being well informed but because it finds cultural validation in the writer's views. The result is that a lot of successful Substack bloggers are essentially repeating the same basic talking points again and again, never saying anything really new or substantial.
Ever talk to a YouTuber who started out hoping to share detailed info on the things they were personally passionate about, but then felt pressure to tailor their stuff to the algorithm and water it down in order to maintain any audience at all? Substack is the same economy.
What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?
I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.
I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.
Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.
Isn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.
"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.
I don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).
The main reason I used Medium was that, for a period, I had personal stuff in a company newsletter and cross-posted stuff on Medium seemed more official than a personal blog. Haven't used it in years.
I do have a Substack account but have zero interest in monetizing and, after a fair bit of back and forth, I just put all my stuff on a Blogger account I've had for years.
this is about commerical blogs but what i miss more are the more casual ones
cohost was great for this. you could see the creator of tcrf just postin out there having a basic day. and the next post could either be an elaborate shitpost or a long read on the inner workings of the nes
ive checked out bubbles town and bearblog but it feels just like a worse doomscroll than social media and the people there are kinda lame.
It's been pretty well proven that social media companies punish posts with links.
Social media was once hailed as how you attract readers, but social media platforms are interested in either a)revenue or b)keeping people on their platform. A link to someone's blog doesn't help with that.
blogging was like a diary, mostly authentic with people just primarily focused on sharing. some with banner ads on the site to get pocket change.
then with substack, social media monetisation, etc everything became income focus. writers got taken over by influencers and content became focused on grabbing attention. didn' take long for readers to leave after that.
There used to be great writing in magazines and people paid for those.
In fact, Playboy is famous for having excellent authors write articles or do serials. This is my favorite example of "you can be 'good' at two wildly different disciplines"
Mommy bloggers was probably the most ludicrous niche back then. Tons of consumer companies wanted to pay them to promote their product or have a “giveaway”
> “These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated”
Yeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.
- i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here
- at the same time i have a fear of missing out
- most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best
- i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day
- perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made
- for example, a criterion could look like this
- "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"
I've been reading a set of bloggers for 20 years and all but one are all still at it, though one moved a few years ago onto Substack, which ended his RSS feed.
They don't seem to receive high traffic, but they're damn good blogs - which seems to me like a better form of 'success' than any amount of popularity. After all you can find the herd's footprints around all kinds of pointless shit.
I was around when blogging started and I've seen a lot of blogs come and go. The web was a much different place then and it was easier to attract and hold an audience than it is now. It's still possible to have a successful blog but it will never be as easy as it was in 2000.
the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts.
find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.
This is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me.
Most of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.
Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.
"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket."
Yes, LLMs certainly learned these tropes somewhere. I'm just surprised that different models and different pre-processing methods arrived at the same dominant cliches.
I cannot stand writing style of this page. I have read almost half and the most important thing they say is, that I will learn later. Ok, I will never know.
>Ranking number one no longer even guarantees you're the source the AI quotes.
I noticed Google's AI summary seems to link to seemingly obscure videos occasionally.
It Will be interesting to see what happens to YouTube once AI turns it All to text and indexes it. Efficiently viewing YouTube must be at odds with how they want you to keep watching
I suspect you're projecting too much meaning into it. I routinely get TikTok "citations" on science questions. I think it's more or less the LLM making up after-the-fact justifications for what it says by picking something out of a hat.
The only place for me to consume information is this place, some reddits and yes my Claude cli. I know you guys thinking. But it's how it is. I don't use any other medium anymore. I am thinking of ditching reddit. The bubble toxicity is too much there.
The era that existed before blogging, wasn't that bad. So nothing to be concerned about. Less stuff to read and comprehend. Recipes, traveling, DIY? They are good, It is not like someone pouring out all their views and thoughts on you.
I find myself irritated by this article because its headline is about how blogging has collapsed, but you have to get into the article to find that it's only the blogs that were gaming SEO to make a buck that have collapsed. Those blogs deserved to die.
I've had a personal blog for 19 years. I write about my special interests: old cameras, old roads, old buildings. And whatever else comes to mind. My search traffic has been steady for years.
I know my little crappy blog does not count but I am curious if any others do something similar to me. When interest wanes I take the articles offline, destroy the VM and edit them offline for some period of time until there may be interest and then I put them back up on a different domain so that archive sites become disjointed and disconnected from it to bury my edits of typos and such. This allows my articles to (d)evolve with me as I, the internet platforms, society and other things change.
I create and destroy VM's all the time. It only takes a few minutes to set it back up and that's without any automation. Perhaps others share your view and I am the only one that does this. No sense in wasting money on a VM that will just sit idle and maybe get a hit or two per day from real people that is as I block most bots and all search engines [1].
> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable
Was the claim really that the model was profitable on the basis that they managed to find a whole 100 individuals who were making the income of an entry-level software engineer? That's... not a ringing endorsement for the income potential
This comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code.
100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed.
A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).
My contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?
Fair, the flavor certainly changes if you suspect that it is close to the whole list of such bloggers, and it would seem kind of like lottery winners. I think it was likely meant to be understood as a small sample out of a much larger group of people.
I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?
Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.
But I think the internet in general is moving away from bespoke, homebrew content. This is very visible even on HN, where the daily line-up contains corporate and university press releases + newspaper articles about as often as it contains personal blogs.
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices
This needs to be repeated ad nauseum on HN.
For most people (especially those not working in jobs which require heavy amounts of writing, analysis, and reading), text is NOT the default method with which they interact and communicate information.
TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.
Why does it need to be repeated? It is clear enough that the blogging era was a bit of an atypical period, that much is true; but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives? Yes, in reality it’s partly VC News, but the mandate is intellectual curiosity, which most people have had beaten out of them by the time they were fourteen. Some amount of disdain for what most people end up doing by default, for what’s normal, etc., is absolutely instrumental to not having that happen to you.
(For what little it’s worth, and in the spirit of aforementioned curiosity: nausea gives you ad nauseam; with some caveats, a Latin noun in the singular governed by the preposition ad gets the ending -m while retaining the final vowel of its stem.)
Even most of my nerd friends are consuming less and less longform text. It has been years now since budding hackers can pick up their coding skills through YT videos and now TikTok, and suggesting they read through longform documentation or an OReilly book just makes one look out of touch. HN's audience is as susceptible to the trend the GP mentions as anyone else.
I'm currently learning electronics, as well as having just recently sat my Physics/Math finals. I can tell you with 100% certainty you CAN'T learn shit from /just/ video.
Actual learning requires you to think about what you just read, maybe re-read it multiple times, stop to try and solve a example problem, etc - all of which require you to stop/rewind which video inherently disfavors.
Besides, I think just like handwritten notes might have a slightly different neurological effect than typed ones, reading might just be a very different mental muscle more connected to comprehension; humans had oral language for much longer than any script, so maybe it came with some different connections to higher brain structures as well.
Illusion of learning is more important than actually learning stuff to many.
I prefer to separate it as "casual learning/curiosity" and "intentional learning" rather than something so crass. I'd admit to being an enjoyer of both, I have no dreams or illusions about me becoming civil engineer or city planner just because I like watching those sort of videos, even though they're informative as well as mostly just entertainment with unreliable narrators.
As long as you're conscious about what mode you're in (which to be fair, many probably aren't), I think it's fine.
Well, I was talking about myself. I used to learn mostly through videos, but I often struggled to apply what I'd watched. Over time, I realized I learn best by reading, writing, and actually putting things into practice, rather than passively consuming videos. Videos often gave me the illusion that I was learning, but later I'd have trouble recalling or using what I'd learned. I don't have that problem with text.
The only thing you’re saying with “certainty” is that you personally cannot learn only from video. Anything else is pure hubris.
I’ll say this with certainty, video is terrible reference material.
Talk me through something the first time, sure, but if I need to look something up (yes, I know asking an LLM is available) I want a comprehensive subject guide, mostly in text, searchable by actual keywords.
I think parent is trying to make the point that yes, for you video is a terrible reference material. For me too, but some people do keep links to videos and look up things that way, as surprising and counter-intuitive (to us) that may be.
You could compare performance on a timed exam between access to YouTube or to an open textbook. It really isn’t a generational vibe thing. They are different mediums.
Nobody said they do that though? Weird comment from my perspective.
They said they learn from them, not that they are effective references. I’m not buying the “us and them” or to each their own on this one, sight unseen. Do you have an example?
I mean of course you can go back to a point in time in a video, if you index a transcript and ignore the weird narration and wait through the typing sounds, OCR whatever comes up on the screen to copy and paste and need animations to be reminded you are supposed to pay attention, and you are aligned with the video feed algorithm.
I’m not trying to stop anyone.
> but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives?
Well, when the question is "why did the blogs go away" the answer might be difficult to investigate by only considering a narrow slice of the potential audience for said blogs.
>TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.
That's not exactly neutral though, but part of a larger theme of regression from literacy to a visual and oral culture (and a dopamine seeking junky one).
Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.
Audio may feel easier to multitask with, but how much do you actually retain?
I'm usually listening to the stuff I'm expecting to be not really worth retaining, but useful to skim though once.
Like "crime and punishment".
Alright I'll bite: What are you getting out of skimming through what is widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time? General plot points? That can be accomplished with a readthrough of the SparkNotes.
Well, I might have been too harsh. Listening is better than "skimming". It is actually slower, so you're retaining more.
>greatest novels of all time
I was forced to read it at high school, finished about a quarter, didn't enjoy it a slightest bit, and managed to sabotage the rest of the reading successfully.
Many people told me that the book just wasn't fit for my age and maturity level, so I promised myself to re-read it as an adult. Now I am executing this plan.
I am still not impressed. Of course, the language is much better than what youtubers are speaking in, so listening is more pleasurable, but overall the book is underwhelming.
Dostoyevskiy himself admitted that the book is a merger of two drafts, none of which he managed to complete on its own, and indeed it feels like that.
The first component (which had been called "Drunkards" before the merger) is about the life of alcoholics. I cannot really reflect, since I never drank any alcohol at all. Perhaps it could teach me how to deal with them, but so far the most conclusion I have drawn is just "avoid".
The second component is a so-so detective story. It could have been better, if the protagonist hadn't been clearly mentally unwell. You know, any plot involving insane people is not really worth reading, because admitting that your character is a madman is basically saying "his motivations are not what real people have". Any question of the form "why did he do X", are immediately answered with "because he is a madman". Okay, fine, now what about actually describing real human behaviour?
>That can be accomplished with a read-through of the SparkNotes
No, not really. I can feel it quite well when something like this can be accomplished. Sometimes I start listening to a book, only to find out that listening doesn't work, I _need_ to see the words in order to understand what is going on. This happened more than once, so I am confident that it's not an exception.
One of the nicest things about multitasking audio is that it's easier to concentrate for a long time since I'm busying my body.
If I'm sitting down to read, my body thinks I'm trying to take a nap.
This appears to be true for a plurality, or maybe just barely a majority of people.
I don't find audio so easily multi-tasks, unless we're using different definitions. My example: I find it very difficult to do something described in an audio or video format - rewire a light switch, say. I find it way easier to have text with a diagram. I can stop and check the text at any time. I find it easier to go back to previous sentences, than to rewind an audio or video.
When i say multitask I mean that more literally. If you’re driving you can’t read, if you’re a passenger on public transit audio won’t make you motion sick, if you are cooking or cleaning you can have it on in the background, etc.
Reading requires the full use of your eyes, no way around that.
Fair enough - we have different definitions. If I have audio on while driving or cooking or cleaning, I can only half listen, I miss a lot. I have to be very careful with what I listen to while driving, lest it take my attention away from the road, so I only half agree with you.
Video feels easier to consume but is it really easier to produce one that people find easy to consume?
The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.
Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.
>The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.
Not as "fine working" as a book or a magazine or even a PC - not with 10 other districtions available in the form of different apps (and sending notifications), and not with that small of a screen.
Is that really controversial?
Yes. People don't want to go out and buy or borrow physical writing, or lug around a laptop, if they don't have to.
Your post is a red herring, some platforms simply replaced bespoke blogging websites. How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media.
> consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media
I beg to differ. Follow 12 “people” on Insta and you’re just telling the algorithm you’re into parent stuff, or fashion, or makeup, or cars, or attractive women, or attractive men. It’s not like even 50% of what they serve you will BE those 12 people you followed. Most of what you get will be related to the same niches, but it’ll be from randos and AI instead.
It’s nothing like how simple RSS, Google Reader, or even Flipboard in its original iteration, made it to follow a bunch of specific “creators.”
Yeah but nobody uses RSS, which universe are you living in?
I love the idea of RSS yes.
I use RSS, it's great! Why aren't you using RSS?
RSS.
Correct.
It does not require a "service" to consume multiple blogs efficiently, just simply "software" (an app will do).
The below RSS readers pretty much do their job and get out of the user's way. What's amazing is the sheer number of RSS readers that people choose to use; there are so many, people find ones that they personally like.
On desktop: Vienna https://www.vienna-rss.com/
On iOS: R2SReader https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r2sreader/id1608635613
Of course, if one wanted to use a service (or run one oneself), for features like syncing, then that is possible too.
But the basic setup remarkably simple, easy, and useful by itself IMO.
None of that matters since instagram has more users etc. Jesus, the question is "why blogs disappear" - they disappear because users don't care about the value proposition of your RSS app. Most of them are quite shit anyway - little commonality in terms of styling etc.
That's a completely different demand.
The question was "How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today?"
You can do that with RSS.
Now you are saying it doesn't matter because everyone is on Instagram. So you aren't consuming "multiple blogs" in the first place, you're just consuming multiple Instagram accounts.
Keep in mind that nothing stops Instagram from providing RSS feeds for each user account.
You could literally just tell people to stop using Instagram and use Tumblr instead and the problem would solve itself. Tumblr hosts photos, photos albums, and videos, including blogs of several photographers. Tumblr has RSS feeds for each blog. You don't need to have a Tumblr account to follow blogs on Tumblr, you can just put them all into your RSS app and be done. You don't even need a separate RSS app. Vivaldi, a web browser, has an RSS client built-in.
Reddit has RSS feeds. Youtube has RSS feeds. Wordpress has RSS feeds (this is 50% of blogs, essentially). Mastodon has RSS feeds. Bluesky has RSS feeds.
There is nothing that we can do if people deliberately choose to go into a walled garden, but the open gardens still existand you have the full ability to use those instead.
Maybe if more people understood the value proposition of RSS's, they would have more reason to stop using Instagram and move.
I know about RSS, do your users know about RSS? Does a gradpa from midwest looking for a steak recipe care about RSS?
We did have that. What was Mythbusters if not a YouTube show?
> If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on.
This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%.
"People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on?
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money
i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?
> I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years.
This sort of blanket assumption is exactly what the parent is arguing against. The mortality rate of top-n things is relatively easy to measure, and should be baselined first. Then we can compare recent performance vs historical performance, and actually say if something has changed. There's no need to start with the assumption "not much changes over 5 years" -- it can be measured instead.
If we use the S&P 500 as a proxy for the top 500 companies, I would guess that a lot more than 0% will be gone by the end of 5 years.
It's hard to find non-paywalled sources for business analysis, but from what I can find it'd be about 20%.
4.4% turn over per year, 22% in 5 years apparenty
https://www.exchangecapital.com/blog/why-the-sp-500-isnt-wha...
and accelerating apparently
https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2020/01/the-pace-of-creative-...
>I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?
It's still interesting to see that "top 100" hugely succesful blogs can go so much down, even if it's "natural churn".
Then there's the fact that blogs in the "Top 100" are big business (money wise), often established for a decade or more, and have enough subscribers/viewers to spare. So unlikely to just be "dead" in n+5, just declining (which this tracks).
>Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.
So? That's an explanation for the drop. The post tracks the drop itself.
Everyone removed their blogroll. That is what happened. Someone gave Automattic (WordPress foundation that could receive "donations" from advertising platforms) the idea that making blogs mostly discoverable via paid advertising was a good idea. Automattic removed the blogroll by default, and then most of the blogs removed, and then most of the blogs vanished. Blogs were discovered via the huge list of other blogs. There were so many incredible blogs. One could then check all their linked blogroll blogs because birds of a feather flocked together...
Automatic became an NGO. A big advertising seller paid the NGO lots of money. The NGO removed blogrolls so that blogs were discoverable by paid advertising instead of word of mouth. Countless blogs also removed their blogrolls, and blogging declined.
That is one more thing that Google has done to destroy the web that gave birth to it. That happened around 2012.
Also, old blogs were like having a subject matter expert as your personal mentor via correspondence. Those new blogs would have been called content farms in the days of the blogroll. Search back then was based on keywords and boolean. You could type "NOT youtube" and no youtube would fill your results. The top blogs are content farms by the old standards.
Google removed the ability to use boolean search to get exactly what you want based on text content, and then they removed the blogrolls via bankrolling the WordPress developers. Now the top content farmers get top billing on every search engine, which requires marketing spend, the blogrolls are niche structures, and you cannot boolean your way to a real set of search results.
https://mor10.com/newspack-automattic-google-and-the-saasifi...
Blog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good.
But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.
It’s always “safe to ignore” a blog because there’s seldom actual negative consequences for doing so. If you want to use such a silly, absurd heuristic, feel free to pay the opportunity cost. Pointless nostalgia-driven web surfing at its finest.
I went with feedly whe Google reader died.
I wrote my own but for most people feeds just ended with google reader.
Really? One more way in which I'm just not a representative sample, I suppose.
You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French).
So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happy writing my ideas/thoughts down, for me.
But you seem to be writing, not "creating content". Nothing in the article applies to you.
[dead]
I think it is very good and healthy to not care too much about readership numbers, but you seem pretty high on your pedestal here - you still publish it to the public, you still seek an audience. If you’re doing it just for you, then why are you hosting a blog For the world to see? Surely there is some part of you that wants people to read it, otherwise you wouldn’t, right?
Just knowing that people could read my blog is forcing me to take better care of my writing. This is the most important reason. And only my friends and family know the address, it is not indexed :-D
That’s fair. Also I definitely shouldn’t have said you’re on your pedestal that was a bit too rude, so apologies for that.
No going back now.
Loïc d'Anterroches (often referred to as Loic) runs the blog/news section on his company's site: https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/.
Yes, but this is not the one where I wrote about politics, life and society... still, the writing style is not that different, so, I suppose an AI system would be able to easily associate my crappy personal blog to me (not sure if they are respecting the noindex stuff the way Google does) and build a profile of my personality out of it.
Note: Interestingly, seeing my full name here is not something I expected.
I apologise for this, the real terrifying thing that it took me 1 minute and one shot prompt on Grok to get all this – and a lot more. Just check yourself. We all are heavily royally f...d, my firend. (I found similar level of details about myself too)
Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc.
For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible even if nobody but me cares or uses them.
I blog stuff I want to remember
I have a wiki for that, but I keep reading the Arbiters of the Internet around here claim wikis are even deader than personal blogs, so what do I know. :-)
I mean sure but is your wiki public? If not, that’s one extra step to access your content. If it’s public then it’s basically a blog right?
It's on a public IP, but isn't open to public users. I don't personally think 'the place I scribble stuff I want to remember down the road' is a blog, but I'm equally uninterested in arguing a distinction I don't think much matters. I don't know what you mean by 'extra step' unless you mean 'loging in', which is a hurdle I assume I'd have to jump over if I was posting a blog entry.
Edit: hit post too soon...
I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.
Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
What happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left.
That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.
I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc.
(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)
Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.
IIRC I was done with Slashdot before those other sites were even created (or at least widely popular).
RMS wasn't "cancelled" (a reminder that "canceling" and "canceled" is a snarl word.)
His decades of incredibly shitty behavior came to be more public knowledge as both men and women in CS realized the behavior they'd witnessed wasn't some outlier once a few women who were well-known came forward and disclosed his behavior.
What brought it all to bear was him repeatedly, on a technical mailing lists, defending sex with underage girls, which in turn led people to actually go looking through material on his own site where he pontificated that sex with anyone over 14 should be legal, or even younger. These are his exact own words:
"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
Add onto that decades of stories of creepy, manipulating, harassing behavior toward girls/women as well as incredibly sexist comments about women's technical abilities...among a lot of other really anti-social behavior, like an apparent refusal to bathe...while expecting anyone who hosts him to read a 40 page long missive about exactly how treat him.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAA2dU8RmhA
Tl;dr: different races have different fertility peak ages.
It is an interesting case study. Most designers would not think that they can tank a site.
One of the smartest things reddit ever did was ensure old.reddit.com remains fully functional. I imagine one day they'll EOL it, and when they do I'll no longer be a reddit user (probably not really a bad thing).
Even if Old Reddit still exists, the vast majority of users are on New Reddit or the app on their phones. Those are designed to keep people endlessly scrolling, not sticking around in any one place and building community. Also, the phone as default device has reduced comments to 140-character quips, and one looks like a real weirdo now if one writes a solid paragraph or two like in the old days.
"TL;DR" transformed into "TL;must be AI"
they're gonna start making you log in on old to combat scrapers.
I’m good with that. Wanting usable design is not related to avoid logging in.
Wow following the Digg playbook
Well, it's kinda surprising that Digg actually followed the Slashdot playbook (Slashdot fucked up first) - Digg should have at least learned something from Slashdot's mistake.
Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.
I can’t believe how long ago that was.
I had the same blog post get on HN and on Slashdot. HN link didn't get to the front page, got about 25 human visits. The link on Slashdot got the blog post 2500 visits, plus the Slashdot IP addresses visited tons of other posts and content on my web site. Maybe places don't get "slashdotted" any more, but a link on Slashdot seemingly gets you a ton more visits than a link on HN.
Also, Slashdot visitors use more MacOS and Linux than Windows. The reverse is true of the small number of HN visitors.
Is Reddit still alive? And TikTok has no search feature
If you gave me one of the "100 Successful Blogs" without framing it as a "successful blog", I would not say "this is a successful blog". The 5 or so I looked at all seemed very similar, like they were part of an MLM scheme, and had uninteresting content. I did not recognize a single one of the 100.
If you imagine Google's job is to present useful information, these blogs that are maximizing cash while simulating usefulness are exactly the sorts of things I would hope Google to want to filter out.
(I don't think Google's often capricious ranking changes really succeed at this, but the outcomes in this post seems like something hypothetically good?)
About half of what I clicked through were sales funnels.
Traffic for my blog has fluctuated depending on whether or not my site is referenced in the Overview that month for relevant phrases.
This whole thing is a pretty fascinating insight into a whole other corner of the internet ecosystem:
> For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog."
Then:
> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable. [...] If you tried to start a blog between roughly 2015 and 2022, most probably you read blog income reports as they were the proof of concept and held up to a generation of aspiring small publishers as this is what winning looks like, and you can do it too.
It's the blog/SEO equivalent of today's TikTok influencer culture.
There was a pretty small slice of bloggers like Michael Arrington who really put in a lot of time and created a brand/company that did pretty well off blogging (for a time). But blogging then and now is pretty much a side-gig for a lot of people that doesn't bring in much money. Which is fine. But social media, which has itself contracted, has cut into a lot of that.
I did start a blog in that time period and this is the first time I've ever heard of this. (Admittedly, I wasn't trying to directly make a living off of it.)
If I write a detailed explanation of some industrial electrical detail in some electrician forum, perhaps one or two people will upvote it. If I write some very general, snarky comment in a general forum, I'll get hundreds to thousands of upvotes. Blogs are the same. An excellent niche blog might churn along for many years, but few will ever know it exists, and it won't get on one of these surveys. A clever, popular blog, written to get big quickly, and heavily promoted by the author, will get on all the lists. And most of them won't last five years.
No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.
There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).
Result of ai will be that there will be no blogs. No one will find blogs and if someone writes one, search chatbot will just copy it.
So, eventually no one will write them.
Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
> everything they put online will be added to the training data if countless LLMs
Here's something I learned today - if you stab a feijoa with a sharp enough knife, it screams like a walrus. Try it.
Blogs are already dying and basically dont exist outside few platforms favored by search engines.
People are way less likely tondo pointless thing.
> People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
>People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
People weren't always writing blogs because the term and associated platforms hadn't always existed but people were always writing, often about themselves, and BBSs and personal websites served the purpose that blogs later would online.
Blogs and search engines happened to arrive on the web at almost the same time and evolved in parallel. The vast majority of early blogs were written without any visibility on search engines much less any viewers. It's difficult to imagine in the modern day but people used to do things because they wanted to, not to maximize commercial interest or fame. Search engines helped the popularity of blogs, but weren't the catalyst so much as the existence of services like Blogger and Livejournal. What killed blogs wasn't google but social media. But people kept writing on social media in much the same way that they did on blogs. The medium changed but the desire for self expression didn't. We just call blogs feeds now but it's more or less the same thing.
Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.
Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.
You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.
The fact that now only substack blogs survived is result of the exact process I am talking about - search engine not returning smaller platforms and those blogs dying.
AI is just another step in that process.
> You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.
I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?
Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.
I’m curious why many tech bloggers choose Substack, when it’s almost trivial to set up your own blog with infinitely more style control, and math/syntax-highlighting etc.
Substack handles emailing and payments well. Many people want to receive posts by email, which is a pain to do on your own with high deliverability. Some are willing to pay for it, and payments are similarly annoying (and benefit from a familiar interface, which Substack now provides).
Substack, Medium, Tumblr, etc. absorbed a lot of the blogging crowd. And of course we have hordes of people throwing AI slop at each other on Linkedin. Tumblr and Medium are of course a bit past their prime at this point. That's what happens to VC funded companies after they fail to take over the world. Might happen to Substack as well.
Add to that Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc. and you have a very fragmented space of people exchanging content at each other.
It's not so much that blogging is dead but that it got overtaken by other platforms that aren't necessarily much better. And the fragmentation hurts distribution. And commercialization, injects a lot of bad incentives into the whole space that rewards people that are mostly just very loud and uninteresting.
A lot of the blogging tools still work fine. It's not that hard to accumulate lists of interesting RSS feeds. Mastodon actually has RSS feeds, BTW. It can double as a blogging platform.
It's just that it all competes for attention and some people are a bit too loud. At this point, the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible for an unfiltered list of blogs these days. That was fine when people moderated themselves. But now that they don't, it's hard to filter out all the noise. And the commercial algorithms don't help much as they tend to favor click bait rather than substance.
Given the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not.
I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.
The articles does say
> The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead
It is about a particular type of directly profit making blog business model:
> The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads.
Understood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword.
All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.
I consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place. You could literally listen to a different song from a different artist for the rest of your life. The industry is saturated.
In 2020, I was getting an insane amount of visitors from Google on my blog. Today, Google doesn't bring more than a hundred a day. Yet search impressions are higher than ever. It felt like a failure on my part, but then we always talk about the small web and what happens when the websites become two commercial. Despite the thousands of AI blogs that regurgitate whatever gets posted on HN, we get to read so many good small blogs right here. Blogging is still a fun practice, and I encourage people to do it, even it's only to help them refine the ideas in their mind.
Nope, sorry.
As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.
But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.
There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.
The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?
>But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.
This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.
Same sentiment here. B-tier hit factory stuff is easy to catch and easier to ignore and move on from. Also happy to recognize a fellow Stevie Wonder fan.
In the age of AI, interchangeable content farms that earn pennies by filling 80% of the screen with ads are dead. In fact, the user hostility of those "blogs" is what pushes people even further towards AI interfaces that output what matters up top and (for now) without ads.
Good websites are suffering the same fate though.
Blogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago.
There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the terse blog posts that dominated 1-2 decades ago. Even major media sources such as the NY Times The Atlantic are copying the substack contrarian style that is thriving now.
Substack blogging is very different from old-school blogging. The Substack culture puts much more emphasis on writing daily in order to maintain engagement, and to closely target those daily posts to a market that will open its wallets. And not necessarily because that market is being well informed but because it finds cultural validation in the writer's views. The result is that a lot of successful Substack bloggers are essentially repeating the same basic talking points again and again, never saying anything really new or substantial.
Ever talk to a YouTuber who started out hoping to share detailed info on the things they were personally passionate about, but then felt pressure to tailor their stuff to the algorithm and water it down in order to maintain any audience at all? Substack is the same economy.
What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?
I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.
I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.
Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.
> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now
How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.
Isn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.
OK then it's not really 'easy' nor that different from "5 years ago"
"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.
I don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).
The main reason I used Medium was that, for a period, I had personal stuff in a company newsletter and cross-posted stuff on Medium seemed more official than a personal blog. Haven't used it in years.
I do have a Substack account but have zero interest in monetizing and, after a fair bit of back and forth, I just put all my stuff on a Blogger account I've had for years.
I think Google is not longer the main driver but social media and sites where you submit links like hacker news and Reddit
this is about commerical blogs but what i miss more are the more casual ones
cohost was great for this. you could see the creator of tcrf just postin out there having a basic day. and the next post could either be an elaborate shitpost or a long read on the inner workings of the nes
ive checked out bubbles town and bearblog but it feels just like a worse doomscroll than social media and the people there are kinda lame.
It's been pretty well proven that social media companies punish posts with links.
Social media was once hailed as how you attract readers, but social media platforms are interested in either a)revenue or b)keeping people on their platform. A link to someone's blog doesn't help with that.
blogging was like a diary, mostly authentic with people just primarily focused on sharing. some with banner ads on the site to get pocket change.
then with substack, social media monetisation, etc everything became income focus. writers got taken over by influencers and content became focused on grabbing attention. didn' take long for readers to leave after that.
There used to be great writing in magazines and people paid for those.
In fact, Playboy is famous for having excellent authors write articles or do serials. This is my favorite example of "you can be 'good' at two wildly different disciplines"
There's zero overlap between this list and the blogs I read. Looking over the list, there seem to be a lot of "mommy blogs?"
Mommy bloggers was probably the most ludicrous niche back then. Tons of consumer companies wanted to pay them to promote their product or have a “giveaway”
And if "mommy" content is no longer popular in blog form, then, anecdotally, it's found a new, lucrative medium in short-form videos a la Tiktok.
Popular probably, lucrative unlikely
s/ludicrous/lucrative
> “These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated”
Yeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.
I think literally everyone who cares about Geminispace is already here on HN so I wouldn't worry about it.
- let me tell you my problem on HN
- my life is too short
- far too many of you write blogs
- i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here
- at the same time i have a fear of missing out
- most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best
- i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day
- perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made
- for example, a criterion could look like this
- "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"
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This isn't about blogging per se. Its about commercial product-to-market fit. That market now favors short centralized video content.
Access to that market is controlled by a monopoly, and that monopoly is now putting AI generated content and ads above competitors.
This is in the article.
I've been reading a set of bloggers for 20 years and all but one are all still at it, though one moved a few years ago onto Substack, which ended his RSS feed.
They don't seem to receive high traffic, but they're damn good blogs - which seems to me like a better form of 'success' than any amount of popularity. After all you can find the herd's footprints around all kinds of pointless shit.
Substack does support rss, though they don't link it anywhere. Just add /feed on the end of the url.
I was around when blogging started and I've seen a lot of blogs come and go. The web was a much different place then and it was easier to attract and hold an audience than it is now. It's still possible to have a successful blog but it will never be as easy as it was in 2000.
> one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“
I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.
yeah, the answer lies exactly there.
the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts.
find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.
These are also getting wrecked by the AI overviews and LLMs in general.
This is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me.
https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
I have a blog because I like having a blog. It has made me neither rich nor famous.
Most prolific visitor is probably my mom and some bot out of Singapore.
Most of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.
My conclusion was the same. So many blogs hyperoptimize for SEO but 1 change from ranking algorithm decimated them all.
Nope. The effect described affects all websites. I wrote about my case a month ago, and many people have reached out in private to commiserate.
https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
Looking at the categories should tell you what happened (lifestyle & fashion, finance, travel, parenting, food & recipes):
They moved to Youtube/Instagram/TikTok for better reach, a larger, total audience, and improved monetization
This article was AI generated and a waste of time. So many obvious LLM patterns that I stopped reading 10% of the way down the page.
Agreed - having played a lot with AI content generation - it's impossible not to recognise it.
What's annoying is that you can put effort in and de-AI something. But it takes work. And no one wants to put the time in.
A perfect mirror of the whole blogging-for-money space then
Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.
"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket."
Agatha Christie, 1936
Yes, LLMs certainly learned these tropes somewhere. I'm just surprised that different models and different pre-processing methods arrived at the same dominant cliches.
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/the-great...
> We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, and human-written content: 78% AI likelihood
I cannot stand writing style of this page. I have read almost half and the most important thing they say is, that I will learn later. Ok, I will never know.
This also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword
>Ranking number one no longer even guarantees you're the source the AI quotes.
I noticed Google's AI summary seems to link to seemingly obscure videos occasionally.
It Will be interesting to see what happens to YouTube once AI turns it All to text and indexes it. Efficiently viewing YouTube must be at odds with how they want you to keep watching
I suspect you're projecting too much meaning into it. I routinely get TikTok "citations" on science questions. I think it's more or less the LLM making up after-the-fact justifications for what it says by picking something out of a hat.
The only place for me to consume information is this place, some reddits and yes my Claude cli. I know you guys thinking. But it's how it is. I don't use any other medium anymore. I am thinking of ditching reddit. The bubble toxicity is too much there.
The era that existed before blogging, wasn't that bad. So nothing to be concerned about. Less stuff to read and comprehend. Recipes, traveling, DIY? They are good, It is not like someone pouring out all their views and thoughts on you.
I find myself irritated by this article because its headline is about how blogging has collapsed, but you have to get into the article to find that it's only the blogs that were gaming SEO to make a buck that have collapsed. Those blogs deserved to die.
I've had a personal blog for 19 years. I write about my special interests: old cameras, old roads, old buildings. And whatever else comes to mind. My search traffic has been steady for years.
Lovely bit of AI "art" to caption this one.
I thought the number was going to be like 5 or 7 blogs remaining after 4 years... 21 actually seems pretty healthy, given general blogevity imho.
> The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.
Yay!
Quite an assertion, I hope it is true
Sadly it's only true because Google itself replaced that entire business sector with its own AI overviews
That entire business sector is a cess pit of SEO slop.
Good riddence
I know my little crappy blog does not count but I am curious if any others do something similar to me. When interest wanes I take the articles offline, destroy the VM and edit them offline for some period of time until there may be interest and then I put them back up on a different domain so that archive sites become disjointed and disconnected from it to bury my edits of typos and such. This allows my articles to (d)evolve with me as I, the internet platforms, society and other things change.
That seems like a lot of effort to go through
That seems like a lot of effort to go through
I create and destroy VM's all the time. It only takes a few minutes to set it back up and that's without any automation. Perhaps others share your view and I am the only one that does this. No sense in wasting money on a VM that will just sit idle and maybe get a hit or two per day from real people that is as I block most bots and all search engines [1].
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Som...
Substack is doing just fine. Blogging didn't collapse, a bunch of spammy get rich quick types were a flash in the pan as expected.
I guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
Personally, I think now might be a good time to run a personal homepage
For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“
I can't believe this sentence exists.
Lileks is still going. What else matters?
They all moved to Substack.
From a consumer’s POV, Substack usually signals the article is trash (because the incentive is money instead of making good content)
“The hard truth is” an AI slop tell, which the whole article is
AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
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> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable
Was the claim really that the model was profitable on the basis that they managed to find a whole 100 individuals who were making the income of an entry-level software engineer? That's... not a ringing endorsement for the income potential
This comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code.
100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed.
A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).
My contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?
Fair, the flavor certainly changes if you suspect that it is close to the whole list of such bloggers, and it would seem kind of like lottery winners. I think it was likely meant to be understood as a small sample out of a much larger group of people.