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The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

danielstanica.com

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Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#61

Post by graemep »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36

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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#62

Post by alephnerd »

zerobees wrote: post #27

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 fashi…

> 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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#63

Post by watwut »

jefftk wrote: post #31

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: pi…

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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#64

Post by krapp »

watwut wrote: post #63
jefftk wrote: post #31

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: pi…

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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#65

Post by Forgeties79 »

Loic wrote: post #51

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 happ…

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?

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#66

Post by Loic »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #65
Loic wrote: post #51

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 happ…

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

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#67

Post by squidbeak »

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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#68

Post by firefoxd »

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.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#69

Post by bobthepanda »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
zerobees wrote: post #27

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 fashi…

> 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…

Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.

Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

#70

Post by Forgeties79 »

Loic wrote: post #66
Forgeties79 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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