Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

Showing all posts about blogs

Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

22 November 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

Uni Watch, which has been online in one form or another since 1999, announced its closure a few weeks ago. At first it seemed the entire website, including archived content, was to be removed within days, but in a later post, founder Paul Lukas said the site’s future remained unclear. There’s a suggestion Uni Watch might continue publishing, though that is still far from certain.

The survival of niche interest websites and blogs, such as Uni Watch, are, in my opinion, vital for the future of the web, as I wrote the other day.

It is of course unreasonable to think every owner operated website, or those with a small team of writers, that began publishing decades ago, will keep going forever. What’s unfortunate is the format, niche/speciality blogging, seems to increasingly be regarded as passé.

Niche blogs are just too weird, their presence cannot be tolerated

22 November 2025

Megan Greenwell writing for Talking Points Memo, AKA TPM:

When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. On one level, that’s for the best; I can think of exactly one Deadspin employee in the site’s history who could accurately be categorized that way. But it also makes clear just how much private equity has taken from us: not just local newspapers providing invaluable information about communities, but also blogs willing to get weird, to try things no one else would.

Ah yes, make one publication profitable by shutting down competing outlets. But this is nothing new.

There were a number of blogs I followed back in the day, fifteen to twenty years ago, pretty much on account of their owners’ — how do I say? — colourful personalities. Many of them ended up being sold, and not long afterwards, ceasing publication.

Surely buyers cannot have gone into the transaction with their eyes closed.

The success of these blogs was, to a large degree, because of their quirkiness. Was the buyer certain they could replicate this ? It made a few people wonder. Back then of course a few blogs going offline was not a problem, plenty more were always coming along. Not so much today though.

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.

Curiosity-driven blogging: try doing that on TikTok or Instagram

12 November 2025

Simon Willison:

My piece this morning about the Marimo acquisition is an example of a variant of a TIL – I didn’t know much about CoreWeave, the acquiring company, so I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.

This is how I might refer to the longer articles I write. When I’m able to write them, that is. So often I intend to make but a brief mention of a given topic, but find my curiosity piqued, bit by bit, with each sentence I type. I soon find myself learning a whole lot more about the subject at hand than I thought I would, and realise I’ve expended some quantity of the midnight oil in doing so.

Is there a medium better than blogging for curiosity driven blogging?

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AI information summaries eating away at Wikipedia reader base

29 October 2025

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.

Blogs, a lot of them, millions of them, as agents for change

23 October 2025

Elizabeth Spiers, writing at Talking Points Memo:

The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

As Spiers says, it might be possible to manipulate the CEOs of large media companies, but doing the same to a million independent publishers, may not be so easy.

Every blog has a yelling dumbass reader

16 October 2025

Hamilton Nolan writing at How Things Work:

If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else.

Nolan is not writing about blogging per se, but his words will be all too familiar to anyone who’s been publishing online for any amount of time.

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Comment spammers use AI in another assault on bloggers

2 October 2025

When I turned comments back on here a few months ago, after an absence of many years, I was amazed at how quickly spam comments began appearing. Good news travels fast it seems. A new outlet has appeared for us to post our drivel — quick — get over there. But because every comment made here is held back for approval, none of them ever see the light of day.

Of course I wasn’t really surprised at the speed at which the spam arrived. Nor the lack of genuine comments, though there have been a few. I re-enabled comments as a way to centralise my web presence back onto this website. I’m not the biggest fan of social media, centralised or decentralised, but not because I dislike it (well, not too much), rather social media is just too time consuming.

What did dumbfound me though was the empty-headed nature of the spam comments being left. Some were barely coherent, while others were literally single words made up of random letters. What blogger, in their right mind, is going to approve those sorts of comments? A time-poor blogger, or one not paying attention, I think might be the answer.

These senseless utterances aren’t offensive, so maybe they’ll, you know, just get approved. And with some websites allowing follow-up comments from the same person to be posted without moderation, the floodgates would be open. But I suspect few spam-commenters saw much of what they wrote ever approved. But now they have changed tactics, and are using AI to craft their foul fare.

A lot of the recent comment spam I’m seeing looks as if the writer has read the post they’re responding to, through the way a comment is worded. When I posted about Tim Berners-Lee a few days ago, a lot of comments similar to this began appearing:

Oh Timothy, your call to have AI development moved under the auspices of a global not-for-profit is just a little simplistic, don’t you think? Yes, you invented the internet and gave it to us for free, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But placing AI development in the hands of a non-commercial entity is asking an awful lot.redacted spammy link

At first pass, the comment seems genuine. I too thought Berners-Lee was being optimistic in the extreme by suggesting a global not-for-profit organisation oversee future development of AI, but I’d never call Berners-Lee naive. He knows what he’s saying, and the idea makes sense, though I can’t see it ever happening. But that’s another story.

A commenter though is entitled to their opinion. And it almost seemed like an actual point-of-view, but for the ridiculous inclusion of an embedded spam link. Without, notably, a space after the previous sentence. The writer seems switched-on, but their oddly deficient syntax betrays them. And then the question: why on earth embed a spam link within the comment?

Did they not see the field on the comment form that allows a URL to be included? It’s possible I might have missed the spam-link if they did that. Usually though, I look closely at the URL of a commenter’s website. But then going on to post numerous, slightly differently worded, variations of the same comment, from the same IP no less, somewhat gives the show away.

Even writing this article is helping train the AI spam-commenters though. What bloggers, who allow comments, are facing though are somewhat more sophisticated spammers, who are using AI to compose comment spam that look like the real deal.

And yes, I look forward to seeing the thoughts of the AI spam-commenters in response to this post.

Answer engines: a new challenge for content writers, bloggers

25 September 2025

Press Gazette:

The biggest year-on-year declines were at Forbes (down 53% to 85.5 million visits — the steepest decline year on year for the second month in a row), Huffington Post (down 45% to 41.3 million), Business Insider (down 44% to 66.6 million), and News 18 (down 42% to 146.3 million). The Independent, CBC and Washington Post also closely followed with drops of 41% in year on year site visits.

Nearly all of the world’s top fifty English language websites have experienced declines in traffic, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last twelve months. Only one has bucked the trend, Substack, but I’m not sure that’s good news. But the reason for the sometimes sharp falls in visitors? AI overviews generated by many of the search engines, that’s what.

People searching for information online are increasingly satisfied with the AI generated summaries, that appear, as the first “result”, in response to a question they have. These overviews are created by drawing on webpages carrying relevant information, and spare search engines users from the need to visit said webpages.

It’s great for those looking for a quick answer to a query, provided of course the overview is accurate. It’s not so good for the people who wrote articles, or blog posts, that feed the AI generated overviews, as they no longer see a visit to their website. But this is the future of online search. Instead of search engines though, we will be using answer engines to source information.

In short, answer engines results will be similar to the AI overviews we see at present. Everything a searcher needs to know will be displayed in the result. There will be no need to visit individual webpages again.

From a content writer’s perspective, it can only be hoped answer engines will cite the sources used to concoct their response to a query. This for however many people who might still wish to verify the information provided by the answer engine, that is.

But not everyone writes content to be indexed by a search engine, and many actively prevent their websites from being looked at by the search engines. I get the feeling this may not be the case for answer engines though. Writers and bloggers are all too aware of AI scraper bots marauding their content, whether they like it or not, to train AI agents.

But going forward, this might be something content writers have to expect, accept even, it they want their work to be recognised. We can all see where this is going. The end of SEO, and the advent of — I don’t know — AEO, being Answer Engine Optimisation. Those wanting their content to be found by the answer engines are going to need to figure out how to optimise it thusly.

No doubt help will at be hand though. AEO experts and gurus will surely be among us soon, if they are not already. But that’s enough good news from me for one day.

Download your TypePad blog and post the content to a new website

24 September 2025

Phil Gifford, who gave us ooh.directory, has published a method for downloading a TypePad blog, and uploading the files to a another server, should you so wish, so your TypePad blog can live on under a new guise. Don’t forget, TypePad closes at the end of September, so you need to act quickly if you want to retrieve your blog.

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