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Comment by foxfired | Hacker News Reader

I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025

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>the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.

You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.

[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...

You are right, my statement may be a bit misleading or incomplete. The ~500 readers are not just local rss bots, but they include aggregate RSS bots. For example, I see the feedly reporting ~200 subscribers, newsreader reporting 50 subscribers, feedbin, etc. Each of those only have between 1 to 3 ip addresses. So for each RSS bot, there are an arbitrary number of actual users reading. I can't track those accurately.

However, users can click on an RSS feed article and read it directly on my blog. These have a URL param that tells me they are coming from the feed. When an article isn't on HNs frontpage, the majority of traffic is coming from those feeds.

By the way, thank you for sharing this tool. Very insightful.

These are impressive metrics, are you able to make a living off of your 10M views?

I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content, mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work too, might consider that as well

Not even close to making a living! It does pay for my server though which costs $15 a month. YouTube gives you much more visibility. I'll try to compile the numbers from my single Carbon ad placement and the donations I receive from readers.

But I also don't think I have the process in place to do Blog, YouTube, Podcast and hold a full time job. Yes the job is my source of income.

Making a living on "content" is really hard, subscribers or views don't turn directly into income.

At some point you're getting sponsors to pay for it and then it get complicated.

Yeah I hear you. My understanding is that on youtube you can make ~2k per 1M views with the default ads. I'm hoping that I can be funded by some combination of that and something like patreon/membership/merch. But we will see, it's something I've wanted to do for years and I am getting too old to put off longer.

Hell yeah! Just subscribed.

I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.

Maybe a dumb question but why?

Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ

It is kind of fun even if it serves no purpose. Like those end of year recaps by various services, "oh shit I played that much Hades?"

There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.

Same reason why people have personal projects and share them on GitHub, it's fun to see people using / starring / interacting with your project / blog.

Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.

If you want to count every search engine bot, AI crawler, vulnerability scanner as users then that works, but these days it's basically useless to use these web server logs.

Good article, learned quite a bit.

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