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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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”
Apparently it was trendy for a time, among “blogs” selling “how to get rich making an online blog” blogs, to self-report “income reports”? And this is a bunch of those collected into a spreadsheet, and I guess circulated by the author.
No doubt a significant amount of effort to assemble, but one imagines a pungent degree of selection bias in play…
The Claude seems to be slathered on much more thickly these days than in the 2022 work (understandably), but TFA seems still to apply similar analytical rigor to a similarly weedy niche.
I imagine NFT search traffic may have collapsed in the intervening years, too… and that the spirit of Matt Cutts may be looking down upon the hallowed halls of Google with a similar number of tears for both of those declines…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
> 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).
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.
> 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 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.
It is an interesting case study. Most designers would not think that they can tank a site.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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”
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”
Which is to say, the author’s own 2022 work at “monetizebetter.com”.
https://monetizebetter.com/blog-income-reports/
Apparently it was trendy for a time, among “blogs” selling “how to get rich making an online blog” blogs, to self-report “income reports”? And this is a bunch of those collected into a spreadsheet, and I guess circulated by the author.
No doubt a significant amount of effort to assemble, but one imagines a pungent degree of selection bias in play…
The Claude seems to be slathered on much more thickly these days than in the 2022 work (understandably), but TFA seems still to apply similar analytical rigor to a similarly weedy niche.
I imagine NFT search traffic may have collapsed in the intervening years, too… and that the spirit of Matt Cutts may be looking down upon the hallowed halls of Google with a similar number of tears for both of those declines…
I guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
This also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
>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.
AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
> 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).