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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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194 points gnabgib | 4 comments | 21 Nov 25 22:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ricardobeat ◴[21 Nov 25 23:29 UTC] No.46010340[source]▶
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway

Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.

Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?

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FrasiertheLion ◴[22 Nov 25 00:55 UTC] No.46010984[source]▶
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
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ricardobeat ◴[22 Nov 25 01:13 UTC] No.46011104[source]▶
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
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1. freddie_mercury ◴[22 Nov 25 03:23 UTC] No.46011786[source]▶
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.

To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.

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2. baconbrand ◴[22 Nov 25 03:43 UTC] No.46011903[source]▶
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.

It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.

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3. freddie_mercury ◴[22 Nov 25 04:09 UTC] No.46012035[source]▶
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
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4. baconbrand ◴[22 Nov 25 05:05 UTC] No.46012289{3}[source]▶
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.