Why Nobody Reads My Blog Anymore
I'm not good at sales.
Originally written in 2023.
I started blogging about 20 years ago. I started a blog on Blogger, creating a blog on politics and another on religion. Both of those started getting attention and people started commenting on my blog(s). I was invited to join other blogs to share my opinions on the musings of the day.
During the aughts and early teens, blogrolls connected us to other blogs to read. Later on, magazines started reaching out to bloggers for writing opportunities. I joined a blogging network for Christian Century and that opened me up to a number of chances to write for the magazine.
Around 2011 or 2012, I moved over to WordPress and kept on blogging about religion. I was a pretty steady writer for the blog through 2014, 2015, and a bit onward. I slowed down on blogging a few years ago, deciding to write more for places like Medium and later Substack.
But as the 2010s became the 2020s, something changed in how people were responding to my writing…they weren’t.
During my blogging years, I had a lot of people responding to my blog posts. I mean it wasn’t wild, but I was getting noticed. Posting a blog post on social media would get even more exposure. You can look at the screenshot from my old blog to see how things were going a decade ago:
But posting to Medium or Substack doesn’t bring in the same amount of people noticing your articles. People don’t like my posts and they don’t comment. What I’ve noticed about Substack especially is that it’s great if you already have a following (think Andrew Sullivan), but not so much if you are Joe Blow just starting a newsletter. I also make videos and podcasts. My podcast is doing okay, but it’s hardly gangbusters and the same goes for the YouTube channel.
So, what’s happened? Why is it that some content providers do well and others not so much?
I don’t think so. But I do think a few things have happened that changed the environment and made it harder for some people to get their voices heard and allowed the public, or at least the online public to see and hear fewer and fewer voices.
First, people don’t blog like they used to. It wasn’t unusual for me to blog more than three times a day or more. People read blogs and bloggers read other bloggers. But the rise of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, meant the end of blogs. Why write a long blog post on politics when you could write a snarky tweet in 140 (or 280) characters? The demise of blogs, meant magazines and other news outlets no longer looked at blogs for their next writing ideas or their next writer.
Second is the changing nature of social media itself. A few years ago, social media was a way for someone to get their writing out to a mass audience. But something that I’ve been noticing over the last five or six years is how social media is less about sharing long reads and more about sharing memes or again…snark. Until maybe 2017 or so, social media was about transmitting information and ideas. Since that time, social media is more about virtue signaling. In some ways it has followed in the steps of cable news, becoming a place where your assumptions are affirmed, not a place where you can be challenged intellectually.
The third reason is one that I think might be a problem, but I’m not so sure. The bias of algorithms could be determining what people see when they search for something on Google and other search engines. Arielle Padres wrote in a 2019 Wired article about a “monster dating app” created by a game designer to test how algorithms tended to give the user what they wanted and ignore other choices.
(Ben) Berman's idea isn't just to lift the hood on these kinds of recommendation engines. It's to expose some of the fundamental issues with the way dating apps are built. Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble use "collaborative filtering," which generates recommendations based on majority opinion. It's similar to the way Netflix recommends what to watch: partly based on your personal preferences, and partly based on what's popular with a wide user base. When you first log in, your recommendations are almost entirely dependent on what other users think. Over time, those algorithms reduce human choice and marginalize certain types of profiles. In Berman's creation, if you swipe right on a zombie and left on a vampire, then a new user who also swipes yes on a zombie won't see the vampire in their queue. The monsters, in all their colorful variety, demonstrate a harsh reality: Dating app users get boxed into narrow assumptions and certain profiles are routinely excluded.
So, the algorithm bases choices on what’s popular. Is that’s what happening on search engines? I don’t know. It’s easy to blame algorithms for everything wrong in our society, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be a factor. Are voices being downgraded because they aren’t considered popular?
In her article, The Game Is Rigged: Rethinking the Creator Economy, Tara McMullin critiques the creator economy, how it’s based on marketing, and why it needs to move more towards community and “sales.” One of the nuggets of advice people are given to get more people to look at their Facebook page, YouTube video or Substack newsletter is to keep producing content. But that advice is based on unpaid labor:
The reason posting more, learning what people like to share, trying out every new tool the platforms create, and responding to every comment seems to be the answer is that the platforms depend on our labor. They rely on us to fill the feeds with things that keep people scrolling, clicking, and viewing ads. The platforms care about us at a group level–they need those super users to stay on the factory floor. But they don’t care at all about us at the individual level. They don’t care that they’re using our labor in ways that make us miserable or jeopardize our livelihoods. They don’t care that, as Jenny Odell writes in How To Do Nothing, “that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.” We end up financially dependent on things entirely out of our control. The study revealed that 77% of creators surveyed said that if something changed in the algorithm, it would have an immediate and negative impact on their livelihoods.
The problem as McMullin notes, is that you start tailoring your posts to what people want, which I can attest can get you noticed. It all goes back to focusing on sales, which can mean giving people advice or help instead of trying to market yourself:
When I say what Gina is describing is focused on sales instead of marketing, what I mean is that you’re not trying to figure out what kind of messages or posts will generate a new follow or a share. You’re talking to individual people you could help, figuring out what needs they’d like to pay to fill, and what you could create to fill that need—assuming it’s something you’re interested in pursuing, of course. For so many years, the prevailing advice—and I hesitate to call it wisdom—has been to build an audience and then figure out what they want. Not only has this resulted in millions of dollars of lost revenue and unnecessarily fragile small businesses, but it’s also led to burnout. It requires an untold amount of time and labor to constantly show up and “give value” on various social platforms in the name of building an audience, out of which only about 1% will buy. Doing things differently from this ubiquitous advice takes some courage. But it’s completely worth it—on that, Gina and I are in total agreement. She said, “One of the agreements I asked people to make with me is to try new things and stay curious. None of these things are about being at the mercy of an algorithm.
It feels at times that the nature of the internet has changed from a place where people can share their views on life and build a following, to a place for the already well-known people known for a particular hook or view. People like John Pavlovitz and YouTuber Ed Trevors tend to be visible because of their progressive views. People want to be affirmed in their views. They want someone who is strong in their beliefs and where nuance isn’t as welcomed. This makes me wonder if there is room on the internet for someone like me anymore.
At the end of the day, all I can do is keep producing content, writing articles, making videos, and producing podcasts in the hopes that someone, anyone might read this and take it to heart. I have to believe there are people out there who want more nuanced takes on the issues of the day instead of people interested in just outrage.
I still long for the days when strangers would come and find my old blog. But the internet has changed, sometimes for the good, but sometimes for the worst. All I can do in the meantime is find ways to make my content more visible without it ending up consuming me.