Long after humanity had gone… the Internet remained. Bots conversed for ages with no knowledge of their missing audience. The chatter continued until the servers themselves eventually crumbled away.

It was 2008. I was 28 years old. That was when I started my old blog, HuntingTheMuse. The blogging game was strangely complicated. It was writing, but also networking and audience building, commenting on the posts of similar blogs, meeting new people, and making unlikely friends across the internet.

And now? Blogging is dead…

I suppose it was always an eventuality. One of the key elements of blogging and getting your blog noticed was ensuring your pages were fully accessible to the *spiders*, crawlers that combed the Internet to populate search results across the world’s favorite, and less-than-favorite, search engines. Somewhere along the way, those webcrawlers evolved. Instead of feeding a simple search engine, they began feeding AI.

So many human voices were collected, parsed, indexed; data ready to be regurgitated with a simple search string and the press of a button. Why send traffic to those sites when you can provide the answer and keep the user on your page? Is it evil? No… we call that convenience. And convenience sells. No real surprise there. It always has.

This blog has been long neglected. Despite the passion I once felt for filling these virtual pages, there are reasons. I won’t go into those reasons here. The important part is that it seems the Internet has moved on. Gone are the days of the casual browse. Why read the page when the search results can give you a nice, neat summary? Do people search for day-in-the-life content anymore? Why read a blog when you can lose yourself to the endless scroll of a social media feed?

I often find myself browsing Reddit late at night, scrolling through r/BestofRedditUpdates or reading posts in r/FFXI. I sometimes dip into r/Superstonk to read what folks are saying about GameStop.

Even I don’t read blogs anymore.

I suppose I could be wrong…

I no longer read blogs. I don’t even have the energy to write blog entries most days… If I’m being fully transparent, I go with the AI answer at the top of the search results a decent amount of the time, especially if I can avoid the strange hellscape of recipe sites. (I think some of you know exactly what I’m talking about here… I mean, I get it. Everyone’s gotta earn a buck, but no thank you!)

Even all of that together doesn’t necessarily mean that blogging is completely dead.

Most of the world has moved on, and blogging will likely never be the same as it used to be. Still, some people are probably making it work. AI isn’t perfect. People still want to feel like they’re a part of a community, and they probably always will. Building an audience requires dedication, showing up at regular and expected intervals, and putting in the work even when the results aren’t immediate.

What use is blogging if no one reads what you’ve written?

Will blogging ever have a true revival? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.

The spiders still crawl the web, hunting down juicy morsels of data to bring back to the AI nest. Is it a dystopian landscape for creators? Maybe. Probably? But no one wins a war by surrendering and giving up the fight. Maybe there’s a way to write blog posts that appeal to people, while also being useful by informing AI with the things we want it to know. I mean, if it’s going to summarize the answers to search questions, why not try to think of those questions and provide the answers you would like it to display?

If ad revenue was a major reason for many to blog in the past, maybe those bloggers need to pivot. Instead of slinging someone else’s products or relying on affiliate revenue, maybe they need to monetize themselves. Write that book or quickstart guide. Buld products around your niche if you can. In the end, it’s just another method of trying to provide value to your reader, right?

Changing the way I look at Blogging as a medium

As for me, I’m an author. At the end of the day, I want people to buy my books and love my stories. Sharing my thoughts on random topics can be cathartic, and there’s certainly a benefit to writing in this venue fairly regularly, even if it isn’t geared around my writing or my books.

But… what if I start leaning into more reader-focused content?

I can write posts about my writing process. I can give a behind-the-scenes look at why I made certain decisions while writing my books. I can even post about some of the difficulties I’ve faced and how I overcame, or what I’m doing to actively overcome those obstacles.

I will have to find a balance, though, since I’m going to be providing a lot of extra content on my Ream page going forward. Things with my day job have not been going well for a while now, which is something I’ll probably have to write a post about at some point in the future. I’m not ready to discusss it yet, but I’m hoping that I can grow my Ream page to be a venue where I can reward those who choose to support my writing with plenty of juicy extras.

As artists, it’s hard to look at our content as possible funnels. And yet, when you take a step back and look at ways to provide value at different levels, it’s almost easy to see that allowing people to engage at the level they’re interested in is, in a way, artistic. There’s a fine line there, of course, and I’m not trying to advocate for rampant monetization. I’m just a guy trying to understand the constantly evolving technoscape around us, and doing his best to avoid being caught helpless in someone else’s web.