Why niche blogs and Small Rooms still win - even in the age of technofeudalism
So here’s the point where we pause for a moment to appreciate the wonder that anyone at all is noticing our stuff.
Wow.
But unfortunately that’s all the advice I can give right now. Yes, I’d like to think niche blogs and Small Rooms still win, but that surely depends on how you define ‘winning’…
If you go to the article you will discover it begins with an inventory of sorts of the author’s posts that have received the most attention, at least as measured by traffic, using the “fill a stadium like [A/B/C]” metaphor, which I haven’t seen used since the early days of Web 2.0, when we would excitedly point out that our little web pages were reaching the same audience as a college football game or arena rock show.
I have some experience self-publishing online (pontifications nobody asked for since 2001!) and some thoughts on the why/what/when/etc of it all, but Richard helpfully prompts the reader at the end of their piece, so I can just answer the questions. (More of us should end posts with questions. This is the most I’ve felt that pre-social-networks inter-blogger connection since the mid-2000s.)
So rather than tell you how to reach your readers (as if!), I have a question for you: how do you reach your readers already, right now, and how do you expect to in a near future dominated by lots of AI hype and quite a bit of AI reality?
I don’t. I write this blog primarily for myself. I think of it as my “commonplace book”. I write in three different notetaking apps. Sometimes those notes end up here, which is essentially just a forth, that I happen to post to a public URL. (Sometimes they go straight onto this site, like this.)
As for AI, I’m unbothered by AI slop as it relates to competing for attention (this blog gets hardly any–more on that in a minute). I dislike it for its ability to juice the myriad propaganda machines on the internet, but the distribution channels (aka “social” networks) are far more to blame for the unceasing endumbing of our collective mind. I use AI to think through things, but not to write. Once it wrote something I wanted to use, but I still have not.
What’s changing for you?
So, nothing.
Are you pumping up the paddling pool right now in preparation for a pivot to YouTube and massive fame?
As with so many things, online fame is a lot of work, and the kind of work I have no interest in spending my precious remaining time doing. Same for revenue derived from online notoriety, but at another level of magnitude. I had one random YouTube video get something like 40 million views, I still do not know how or why. It made somewhere in the neighborhood of $3k, after I realized it was getting views and turned on monetization. If I tried to reproduce that tiny success, I am certain I could not.
Would you still write if you had a single reader? And do you appreciate the readers you do have?
This is the interesting question. I started this blog writing to a single person, some of the very first posts speak directly to that person, in fact, like a public correspondence. As blogging gained in popularity in the early 2000s, so did my audience. By the time I was moving to Sarajevo, I regularly had thousands of readers a month. You’ll never guess what happened after I moved back to America and my life became more ordinary. That coincided with the rapid waning of blogging’s brief popularity, and then the absolute death punch of social networks, Twitter, and Instagram.
During the heady days, I remember catching myself self-narrating my life in blog posts. Those of us who were most active in the 90s and 2000s were able to recover from being “terminally online” while the drug doses were still relatively weak. Since the platformification of online life ushered in millions of “views” with brand deals in tow, I am not sure those who have come after have stood a chance.
I continued to journal or commentate here, assuming no readership. I can occasionally send a link to someone as opposed to repeating myself or copying out of some old note (if I could even find it). Recently I gained another reader, someone important to me. I very much enjoy considering their participation as my audience as I write. When they email or text me about a post it feels like applause from a dark corner of a large, empty theater where I rehearse.