15 Years of Blogging

I've been blogging on and off for a number of years but don't do so much nowadays. I think there are several concerns for me:

* It has little audience nowadays, thanks partly to search engines sidelining blogs in their results.

* I was producing a large amount of content without being paid for it. I had set up the blog to promote a book, which has sold reasonably well, but the book also renumerates me for the time I had put into researching the topics. I felt like the blog was work, and it now runs into tens of thousands of words, but people wanted that off me for free.

* Now it also faces the issue of scraping, and while I was delighted to bring certain facts and stories to wider attention, I didn't do so in order to benefit predatory tech corporations.

On the flipside, it has brought me into contact with a handful of other people who provided me with more info on some subjects and were often complimentary. (If I suffered abuse and trolling, it was via social media, often by people who only looked at a thumbnail link.)