(I don't think Google's often capricious ranking changes really succeed at this, but the outcomes in this post seems like something hypothetically good?)

> For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog."

Then:

> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable. [...] If you tried to start a blog between roughly 2015 and 2022, most probably you read blog income reports as they were the proof of concept and held up to a generation of aspiring small publishers as this is what winning looks like, and you can do it too.

It's the blog/SEO equivalent of today's TikTok influencer culture.

Traffic for my blog has fluctuated depending on whether or not my site is referenced in the Overview that month for relevant phrases.

100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed.

A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).

That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.

the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts.

find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.

How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.

I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.

I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.

Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.