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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.

> 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

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.

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.

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.

> 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.

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?

>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?

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.

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...

Blog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.
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.
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).

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

this is about commerical blogs but what i miss more are the more casual ones

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.

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?"
blogging was like a diary, mostly authentic with people just primarily focused on sharing. some with banner ads on the site to get pocket change.

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.

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.
- let me tell you my problem on HN

- 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"

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.

This isn't about blogging per se. Its about commercial product-to-market fit. That market now favors short centralized video content.
> 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.

I was around when blogging started and I've seen a lot of blogs come and go. The web was a much different place then and it was easier to attract and hold an audience than it is now. It's still possible to have a successful blog but it will never be as easy as it was in 2000.
Most of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.
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

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.
This is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

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.
This also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword
>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

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.
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.
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.

I have a blog because I like having a blog. It has made me neither rich nor famous.

Most prolific visitor is probably my mom and some bot out of Singapore.

I think Google is not longer the main driver but social media and sites where you submit links like hacker news and Reddit
Lovely bit of AI "art" to caption this one.
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.
> 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

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.
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.
I guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
Personally, I think now might be a good time to run a personal homepage