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Posted by thm 3 days ago

The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?(danielstanica.com)
86 points | 63 commentspage 3
tayo42 3 hours ago|
>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

zerobees 3 hours ago|
I suspect you're projecting too much meaning into it. I routinely get TikTok "citations" on science questions. I think it's more or less the LLM making up after-the-fact justifications for what it says by picking something out of a hat.
paulpauper 3 hours ago||
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.

fhsm 3 hours ago||
What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?

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.

ghaff 3 hours ago|||
"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.
paulryanrogers 3 hours ago||
> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack 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.

hn_throwaway_99 3 hours ago||
Isn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.
conartist6 4 hours ago||
AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
unknownfuture 3 hours ago||
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formigone 3 hours ago||
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swiftcoder 3 hours ago|
> 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

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

xp84 3 hours ago|
This comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code.

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).

swiftcoder 8 minutes ago||
My contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?