The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
danielstanica.com
The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
1–10 of 191 posts
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#2If 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.
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#3If 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?)
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#4If 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.
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.
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#5AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#6If 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.
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.
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#7> 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
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#8I 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.
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#9> 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.
Re: The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
#10Blogging 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.