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

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• 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.

  by KennyBlanken
• 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.

  by paulpauper
• "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.
  by ghaff
• > 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.

  by paulryanrogers
• 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.

  by fhsm
• 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.

  by TFNA
• 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.
  by torton
• Good websites are suffering the same fate though.
  by nicbou
• 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.

  by firefoxd
• 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?

  by Earw0rm
• 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.

  by hn_throwaway_99
• 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.

  by graemep
• 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).

  by jefftk
• 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.

  by jillesvangurp
• 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.
  by d4rkp4ttern
• 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.

  by watwut
• 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.
  by CapitalistCartr
• 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.
  by bediger4000
• 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.

  by simonw
• 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.

  by wannabebarista
• 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?)

  by evmar
• 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.

  by draginol
• Is Reddit still alive? And TikTok has no search feature
  by inigyou
• 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.

  by bediger4000
• 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.

  by hn_throwaway_99
• 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.

  by Loic
• 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?
  by Forgeties79
• What is your blog? I love reading blogs that exist just for the sake of it.
  by Anoian
• But you seem to be writing, not "creating content". Nothing in the article applies to you.
  by nottorp
• 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...

  by economistbob