Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
20 November 2025
When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful.
In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people prepared to offer definitions of meaningful, and how to write accordingly. It was natural. The web was once awash with all sorts of blogs. Likewise people who wanted to show others how to blog “successfully”.
Again, the definition of successful resided with the individual, but it was obvious this involved monetary return for some people. And why not. If you’re going to invest time and energy in creating a resource that is useful to other people, why shouldn’t you earn money, make a living even, from it?
One of these people blogging about blogging was Melbourne based Australian writer and author Darren Rowse, who launched his blogging resource Problogger in 2004. Without going into detail, because you can look it up for yourself, Rowse, as one of the earlier bloggers about blogging, did, and still does presumably, rather well for himself.
Rowse’s writing, and that of his contributors, attracted numerous readers keen to learn what they could about blogging, and the potential to make money from it.
Problogger is what’s called a niche blog. As a blog about blogging, it has a reasonably singular focus. Some people considered this niche principle to be a core tenet of blogging. There was this idea, in the earlier days of blogging, which possibly still persists, that blogs would do better if they had a speciality. Not only were search engines said to be in favour the approach, but the author of a speciality, or niche blog, would generally be considered to be an expert, of some sort, in their field.
A master of one trade, rather than the proverbial jack of all trades.
Regardless, the world was once full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It was a great time to be alive. If you wanted to learn about something in particular, there was a blog for you. Some publications featured quality content, others required a little fact checking, while some were definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt.
But niche blogging was never a format that suited everyone. There are people who did, still do, well, writing about a range, sometimes a wide range, of topics. Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. Here, the publication itself is the speciality. To repeat what I wrote in the first sentence of this article: the rules of blogging are few.
But the facets of blogging covered at Problogger, and numerous other similar websites, usually only applied to blogs of a commercial nature. That’s not to say one or two personal bloggers might have looked at the tips posted there for increasing their audience, or improving their writing though. But in my view, personal bloggers were not, are not, part of Problogger’s target audience.
It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Problogger, let alone visited the website, maybe fifteen plus years, but a recent mention of it by Kev Quick, via ldstephens, caught my eye. But I don’t believe Rowse is being critical, in any way, of personal bloggers because they do not adhere to a niche or speciality publishing format. That’s not what Problogger, or Rowse, is about.
But this started me thinking, and writing another of my long posts.
In an age where social media, and influencers, have usurped blogs and their A-List authors, in the jostle for supremacy, it has to be wondered what role websites like Problogger still have. Only a handful of blogs generate liveable incomes today. Despite the doom and gloom though, the form has not completely died off. A backlash against social media, and a growing IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, has precipitated a revival in personal websites.
This is a largely non-commercial movement. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with personal websites. Many of us started out with them in the early days of the web. But the web was not only intended for personal journals. It was a vehicle for sharing all manner of information. The web could also empower individuals, and partnerships, to not only set up shop online, be that blogs, or quite literally shops, but potentially make a living at the same time.
But with the revival of personal blogs well underway, I think it’s time to bring niche blogs back into the fold. I’m talking about well written, quality, topic focused resources. This is material fast vanishing from the web, leaving ever diminishing options to source useful and accurate information. What are the alternatives? The misinformation morass that is social media? Being served AI generated summaries in response to search engine queries? A web choke full of AI slop?
At the same time, I’m not advocating for a return of niche blogs plastered with adverts, and popup boxes urging visitors to subscribe to say a newsletter, before they’ve even had a chance to blink at what they came to read.
I’m talking about work produced by independent writers, with an interest in their subject matter, who are not backed by large media organisations, or private equity. This is bringing back reliable sources of information, that also recompenses the content writers in some way. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons about monetisation since the earlier wave of niche blogging. We know it is possible to generate revenue without compromising the reader experience.
A resurgence in personal blogging is the first step in rebuilding a vibrant, thriving, web, or if you like, blogosphere. Now the focus needs to be on restoring the flow of accessible and trusted information.
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blogs, history, IndieWeb, self publishing, SmallWeb, technology, trends
There's 23 comments on this post
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ResearchBuzz has been and continues, since 1998, to be a newsletter/blog about databases, search engines, and online information collections, with an increased focus in the last few years on cultural heritage and endangered archives. Currently publishing twice a day. Free.
Hi Tara, thanks for the link to your amazing resource, I’ve seen it via Mastodon as well. Have added it to my blog roll, yours is the sort of work we need more of 🙂
Hello Tara, I love ResearchBuzz, it has been five years since I started following it, do you happen to know other similar blogs/forums ?
Thanks for sharing. I’d like to believe a resurgence of personal blogs is underway. Is there data that substantiates this claim?
Hey Jorge, thanks for your comment. A lot of the personal blogs I refer to are published by people connected to the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community.Some of these blogs are listed on online blogrolls/directories (also seeing a bit of a resurgence): Blogclub, Blogroll, and ooh.directory, to name a few. Joe Jenett regularly posts links to blogs he finds. Links to individual blog posts (often personal) can also be seen here.
Something I think about quite frequently is the normalized style of writing becoming so predominant since the AI era began. The “smoothed over” style, I call it.
I even find that my own writing has fallen prey to it, because of how much I use AI in my day to day as a software developer so I’m exposed to it more often.
I’m looking forward to seeing a resurgence in more personal writing styles online. Who cares if you’re grammatically correct if you’ve got not style, right?
Maybe I’m thinking of something a little different, but I call it “PR speak” and it’s been around for some time. A style of writing that requires us to think twice about what we say, lest it triggers a lawsuit or something. But there are people who write as they see it, check out the interview series at People and Blogs which features only the work of personal bloggers.
Hi. You have a little typo right at the end. Search for “of if you like”
You can delete this comment.
Great article!
Thanks David, fixed that 🙂
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way that you get locked in, and they start inserting in the feed all kind of junk you don’t want, until a point when you are sick of it and jump to the next place, which is still in phase one, convenient, enjoyable. Then the story repeat, you end up seeing 90% junk, just to be able to see some of the posts of the people you follow.
Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: “Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to chose what to read nor convenience”
Thanks for your comment adiian. I like that fake quote 🙂
I think we’re starting to see this with platforms like Substack. There’s already a rich diversity of “bloggers” there, and they seem to be growing.
Substack has been one of the fastest growing websites in recent times, and there’s a lot of blogs there now. Not everyone likes the platform though.
Platforms like Micro.blog certainly is doing its part to enable personal blogs resurgence. I certainly hope so because the web really needs a counter balance to this algorithmic timeline manipulated by a few big players.
Manton Reece is doing great work with Micro.blog
A WordPress blog on the front page of Hacker News, how old school can you get?
Lol, need to be on the front page of Digg now…
Do stories or articles on Medium count as personal or niche blogging?
Hi Raf, thanks for your comment. My post was a few thoughts in response to some comments some bloggers in the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community made. Didn’t think this would end up on Hacker, but there’s been some great discussion as a result.
Some of the core tenets of Indie/Small Web are own your identity, second, publish to your own (self-hosted ideally) personal website first (then syndicate/cross post to other places, e.g., the socials), and third, own your content. There’s other tenets but these are considered the main ones.
I’m sure there are personal and niche blogs on Medium, and other platforms, like Substack, and that’s fine.
One problem though is those sorts of platforms are owned by someone else. The risk there is they might close (like TypePad did), or they may in the future try and exert more control over your content, since you’re publishing on their property so to speak.
Hope this answers your question.
Hi, author. It’s lucky to have a chance to read this post. After looking through the main contents, i still worried that the era when personal or noche blog is popular would not be back. Now the web is filled with AIGC, due to which a lot of people lose the ability to calmly read a deep post. And the algorithm has imprisoned our vision.
So i only hope my personal blog can appeal to the people who are similarly interested.
Please forgive me if you didn’t understand my idea, as English is not my native language.😊
Hi ChangYo, thanks for your comment. AI, and the algorithms on social media, have changed the way content is read on the web.
It is a lot harder to find people who are interested in what we write on our blogs, but the IndieWeb community is a great place to start finding people with similar interests to you 🙂
Were blogs always about something useful?
Growing up in the 90s, blogs for me were about rants, angst and creative sparks. Blogspot, LiveJournal, Tumblr.
Tumblr is still alive. There’s still a lot of pretty artwork, photographs, and poetry there.
Hi Cayden. Blogs were/are about all sorts of things. Whether they were useful was down to the person behind it. I remember a lot of the blogs (or personal websites as they were then called) I saw in the late 90’s were proudly “websites about nothing”.
I think that idea riffed on an old TV show called Seinfeld that was billed as a “show about nothing”.
Personal websites or blogs whether “useful” or not, have always been, and hopefully remain, part of the web.
What I think we need now though are more of the older style niche blogs, with trusted writing, to counter the AI slop and misinformation (especially on social media) that’s been taking hold the last few years.