The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
danielstanica.com
danielstanica.com
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.
This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%.
"People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on?
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money
i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?
This sort of blanket assumption is exactly what the parent is arguing against. The mortality rate of top-n things is relatively easy to measure, and should be baselined first. Then we can compare recent performance vs historical performance, and actually say if something has changed. There's no need to start with the assumption "not much changes over 5 years" -- it can be measured instead.
It's hard to find non-paywalled sources for business analysis, but from what I can find it'd be about 20%.
https://www.exchangecapital.com/blog/why-the-sp-500-isnt-wha...
and accelerating apparently
https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2020/01/the-pace-of-creative-...
This needs to be repeated ad nauseum on HN.
For most people (especially those not working in jobs which require heavy amounts of writing, analysis, and reading), text is NOT the default method with which they interact and communicate information.
TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.
I don't find audio so easily multi-tasks, unless we're using different definitions. My example: I find it very difficult to do something described in an audio or video format - rewire a light switch, say. I find it way easier to have text with a diagram. I can stop and check the text at any time. I find it easier to go back to previous sentences, than to rewind an audio or video.
Reading requires the full use of your eyes, no way around that.
If I'm sitting down to read, my body thinks I'm trying to take a nap.
Like "crime and punishment".
>greatest novels of all time
I was forced to read it at high school, finished about a quarter, didn't enjoy it a slightest bit, and managed to sabotage the rest of the reading successfully.
Many people told me that the book just wasn't fit for my age and maturity level, so I promised myself to re-read it as an adult. Now I am executing this plan.
I am still not impressed. Of course, the language is much better than what youtubers are speaking in, so listening is more pleasurable, but overall the book is underwhelming.
Dostoyevskiy himself admitted that the book is a merger of two drafts, none of which he managed to complete on its own, and indeed it feels like that.
The first component (which had been called "Drunkards" before the merger) is about the life of alcoholics. I cannot really reflect, since I never drank any alcohol at all. Perhaps it could teach me how to deal with them, but so far the most conclusion I have drawn is just "avoid".
The second component is a so-so detective story. It could have been better, if the protagonist hadn't been clearly mentally unwell. You know, any plot involving insane people is not really worth reading, because admitting that your character is a madman is basically saying "his motivations are not what real people have". Any question of the form "why did he do X", are immediately answered with "because he is a madman". Okay, fine, now what about actually describing real human behaviour?
>That can be accomplished with a read-through of the SparkNotes
No, not really. I can feel it quite well when something like this can be accomplished. Sometimes I start listening to a book, only to find out that listening doesn't work, I _need_ to see the words in order to understand what is going on. This happened more than once, so I am confident that it's not an exception.
(For what little it’s worth, and in the spirit of aforementioned curiosity: nausea gives you ad nauseam; with some caveats, a Latin noun in the singular governed by the preposition ad gets the ending -m while retaining the final vowel of its stem.)
Actual learning requires you to think about what you just read, maybe re-read it multiple times, stop to try and solve a example problem, etc - all of which require you to stop/rewind which video inherently disfavors.
Besides, I think just like handwritten notes might have a slightly different neurological effect than typed ones, reading might just be a very different mental muscle more connected to comprehension; humans had oral language for much longer than any script, so maybe it came with some different connections to higher brain structures as well.
Talk me through something the first time, sure, but if I need to look something up (yes, I know asking an LLM is available) I want a comprehensive subject guide, mostly in text, searchable by actual keywords.
They said they learn from them, not that they are effective references. I’m not buying the “us and them” or to each their own on this one, sight unseen. Do you have an example?
I mean of course you can go back to a point in time in a video, if you index a transcript and ignore the weird narration and wait through the typing sounds, OCR whatever comes up on the screen to copy and paste and need animations to be reminded you are supposed to pay attention, and you are aligned with the video feed algorithm.
I’m not trying to stop anyone.
As long as you're conscious about what mode you're in (which to be fair, many probably aren't), I think it's fine.
Well, when the question is "why did the blogs go away" the answer might be difficult to investigate by only considering a narrow slice of the potential audience for said blogs.
That's not exactly neutral though, but part of a larger theme of regression from literacy to a visual and oral culture (and a dopamine seeking junky one).
Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.
Not as "fine working" as a book or a magazine or even a PC - not with 10 other districtions available in the form of different apps (and sending notifications), and not with that small of a screen.
Is that really controversial?
It does not require a "service" to consume multiple blogs efficiently, just simply "software" (an app will do).
The below RSS readers pretty much do their job and get out of the user's way. What's amazing is the sheer number of RSS readers that people choose to use; there are so many, people find ones that they personally like.
On desktop: Vienna https://www.vienna-rss.com/
On iOS: R2SReader https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r2sreader/id1608635613
Of course, if one wanted to use a service (or run one oneself), for features like syncing, then that is possible too.
But the basic setup remarkably simple, easy, and useful by itself IMO.
The question was "How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today?"
You can do that with RSS.
Now you are saying it doesn't matter because everyone is on Instagram. So you aren't consuming "multiple blogs" in the first place, you're just consuming multiple Instagram accounts.
Keep in mind that nothing stops Instagram from providing RSS feeds for each user account.
You could literally just tell people to stop using Instagram and use Tumblr instead and the problem would solve itself. Tumblr hosts photos, photos albums, and videos, including blogs of several photographers. Tumblr has RSS feeds for each blog. You don't need to have a Tumblr account to follow blogs on Tumblr, you can just put them all into your RSS app and be done. You don't even need a separate RSS app. Vivaldi, a web browser, has an RSS client built-in.
Reddit has RSS feeds. Youtube has RSS feeds. Wordpress has RSS feeds (this is 50% of blogs, essentially). Mastodon has RSS feeds. Bluesky has RSS feeds.
There is nothing that we can do if people deliberately choose to go into a walled garden, but the open gardens still existand you have the full ability to use those instead.
Maybe if more people understood the value proposition of RSS's, they would have more reason to stop using Instagram and move.
I beg to differ. Follow 12 “people” on Insta and you’re just telling the algorithm you’re into parent stuff, or fashion, or makeup, or cars, or attractive women, or attractive men. It’s not like even 50% of what they serve you will BE those 12 people you followed. Most of what you get will be related to the same niches, but it’ll be from randos and AI instead.
It’s nothing like how simple RSS, Google Reader, or even Flipboard in its original iteration, made it to follow a bunch of specific “creators.”
I love the idea of RSS yes.
It's still interesting to see that "top 100" hugely succesful blogs can go so much down, even if it's "natural churn".
Then there's the fact that blogs in the "Top 100" are big business (money wise), often established for a decade or more, and have enough subscribers/viewers to spare. So unlikely to just be "dead" in n+5, just declining (which this tracks).
>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.
So? That's an explanation for the drop. The post tracks the drop itself.
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...
But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.
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.
Note: Interestingly, seeing my full name here is not something I expected.
For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible even if nobody but me cares or uses them.
I have a wiki for that, but I keep reading the Arbiters of the Internet around here claim wikis are even deader than personal blogs, so what do I know. :-)
Edit: hit post too soon...
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.
That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.
Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.
(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)
Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.
His decades of incredibly shitty behavior came to be more public knowledge as both men and women in CS realized the behavior they'd witnessed wasn't some outlier once a few women who were well-known came forward and disclosed his behavior.
What brought it all to bear was him repeatedly, on a technical mailing lists, defending sex with underage girls, which in turn led people to actually go looking through material on his own site where he pontificated that sex with anyone over 14 should be legal, or even younger. These are his exact own words:
"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
Add onto that decades of stories of creepy, manipulating, harassing behavior toward girls/women as well as incredibly sexist comments about women's technical abilities...among a lot of other really anti-social behavior, like an apparent refusal to bathe...while expecting anyone who hosts him to read a 40 page long missive about exactly how treat him.
Tl;dr: different races have different fertility peak ages.
Also, Slashdot visitors use more MacOS and Linux than Windows. The reverse is true of the small number of HN visitors.
(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?)
> 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.
Traffic for my blog has fluctuated depending on whether or not my site is referenced in the Overview that month for relevant phrases.
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).
So, eventually no one will write them.
Here's something I learned today - if you stab a feijoa with a sharp enough knife, it screams like a walrus. Try it.
People are way less likely tondo pointless thing.
> People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
People weren't always writing blogs because the term and associated platforms hadn't always existed but people were always writing, often about themselves, and BBSs and personal websites served the purpose that blogs later would online.
Blogs and search engines happened to arrive on the web at almost the same time and evolved in parallel. The vast majority of early blogs were written without any visibility on search engines much less any viewers. It's difficult to imagine in the modern day but people used to do things because they wanted to, not to maximize commercial interest or fame. Search engines helped the popularity of blogs, but weren't the catalyst so much as the existence of services like Blogger and Livejournal. What killed blogs wasn't google but social media. But people kept writing on social media in much the same way that they did on blogs. The medium changed but the desire for self expression didn't. We just call blogs feeds now but it's more or less the same thing.
Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.
The fact that now only substack blogs survived is result of the exact process I am talking about - search engine not returning smaller platforms and those blogs dying.
AI is just another step in that process.
I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?
Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.
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.
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.
> 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.
All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.
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.
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?
This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.
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.
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.
I do have a Substack account but have zero interest in monetizing and, after a fair bit of back and forth, I just put all my stuff on a Blogger account I've had for years.
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.
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.
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.
cohost was great for this. you could see the creator of tcrf just postin out there having a basic day. and the next post could either be an elaborate shitpost or a long read on the inner workings of the nes
ive checked out bubbles town and bearblog but it feels just like a worse doomscroll than social media and the people there are kinda lame.
then with substack, social media monetisation, etc everything became income focus. writers got taken over by influencers and content became focused on grabbing attention. didn' take long for readers to leave after that.
In fact, Playboy is famous for having excellent authors write articles or do serials. This is my favorite example of "you can be 'good' at two wildly different disciplines"
- my life is too short
- far too many of you write blogs
- i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here
- at the same time i have a fear of missing out
- most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best
- i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day
- perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made
- for example, a criterion could look like this
- "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"
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.
This is in the article.
I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.
the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts.
find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.
And with those kind of websites comment, I meant heavily SEO optimised website. Their content and website are for Google search engine. Not for humans.
Also, I am coming from indieweb POV which isn't about making business out of it. But I do empathise with indie businesses such as yourself. Hope things get better for you.
They moved to Youtube/Instagram/TikTok for better reach, a larger, total audience, and improved monetization
What's annoying is that you can put effort in and de-AI something. But it takes work. And no one wants to put the time in.
> We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, and human-written content: 78% AI likelihood
Agatha Christie, 1936
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
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.
Most prolific visitor is probably my mom and some bot out of Singapore.
Yay!
Quite an assertion, I hope it is true
Good riddence
I create and destroy VM's all the time. It only takes a few minutes to set it back up and that's without any automation. Perhaps others share your view and I am the only one that does this. No sense in wasting money on a VM that will just sit idle and maybe get a hit or two per day from real people that is as I block most bots and all search engines [1].
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Som...
I can't believe this sentence exists.
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
100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed.
A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).