alt Hacker NewsThe Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs?
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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.
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.
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 guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
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.
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.
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
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).
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?"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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
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.