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Comments (115)

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  economistbob
  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...
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  zerobees
  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.
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  Loic
  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.
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  draginol
  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.
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  jefftk
  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).
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  bediger4000
  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.
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  hn_throwaway_99
  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.
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  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.
• CapitalistCartr
  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.
• torton
  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.
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  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.
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  skybrian
  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?"
• jbvlkt
  I cannot stand writing style of this page. I have read almost half and the most important thing they say is, that I will learn later. Ok, I will never know.
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  jl6
  Yeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.
• anon
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• mobilene
  I find myself irritated by this article because its headline is about how blogging has collapsed, but you have to get into the article to find that it's only the blogs that were gaming SEO to make a buck that have collapsed. Those blogs deserved to die.I've had a personal blog for 19 years. I write about my special interests: old cameras, old roads, old buildings. And whatever else comes to mind. My search traffic has been steady for years.
• johnnyApplePRNG
  I thought the number was going to be like 5 or 7 blogs remaining after 4 years... 21 actually seems pretty healthy, given general blogevity imho.
• roadbuster
  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
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  marssaxman
  > 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.
• latentframe
  This also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword
• zkmon
  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.
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  singhrac
  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.
• KennyBlanken
  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.
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  Bender
  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.
• CSMastermind
  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.
• Finnucane
  Lileks is still going. What else matters?
• vachina
  I guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
• asmodeuslucifer
  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.
• worik
  > The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.Yay!Quite an assertion, I hope it is true
• peterdemin
  “The hard truth is” an AI slop tell, which the whole article is
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  higginsniggins
  They all moved to Substack.
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  paulpauper
  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.
• holoduke
  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.
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  tayo42
  >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
• conartist6
  AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
• unknownfuture
  [dead]
• formigone
  [dead]
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  swiftcoder
  > 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 profitableWas 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