single-handedly financed by ad revenue from people refreshing GRRM's not-blog for updates on the Winds of Winter

Just went there to check it out, it opened the front page in Russian(?) for me, even though English was selected in the top right. I re-selected English, it refreshed the page... in Russian. Close tab.

I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?

-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives

-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video

-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult

Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.

At some point, you need to close down.

it's a newfold brand (EIG). that's all I needed to see to explain the shutdown.