Could this be the end of Blogging?

In recent weeks I’ve seen a significant downturn in traffic. What’s going on? Could this be the end of blogging?

My blog is struggling, and a lack of traffic means decreased revenue needed to maintain the site. After my most successful year in 2023, 2024 has so far proved to be disappointing, to say the least.

So what’s behind it?

Generative AI?

Why do we need humans to create content when articles can be generated in seconds with Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence)? Why would anyone want to find a review of a Fender Player Stratocaster when they can just generate one in Chat GPT?

This amazing new technology isn’t all that new anymore, so could it be dealing just as much damage to the blogging industry as it did in the destruction of the translation industry?

Difficult to say, but there’s hope. AI can only pull currently existing (and therefore not necessarily accurate or up-to-date) information. It’s not creative, it doesn’t really have an opinion or a sense of humour, but unfortunately, I’m not sure if that matters.

Time?

When I first started blogging back in 2015, if I’m honest with myself I wasn’t really looking for a side hustle. My ambition was to cleverly beat the system through hard work and a combination of a web development background and a passion for music and writing. My ultimate goal was to do this for a living.

Fast forward to 2024 and I not only face the harsh realities of having to put food on the table, but I’ve also seen my career progress at a higher and more rewarding rate than blogging ever did. Family and work must always come first, meaning less time for the blog, unfortunately.

Content?

In the beginning, blogging, together with music and writing, were my passions, and they complimented each other perfectly. Buy a new piece of guitar gear? Write a review. Write a new chapter for my book? Update the blog. It all flowed.

But with less time comes less time to devote to music, to the point where messing about with bands or even my own music gets harder to the point of not being worth it, and in turn less time doing things equates to less time blogging about them.

Will I regret that? Should I have focussed more time on my hobbies? I guess I have too much at stake to ever find out.

In the end, maybe that free time will come back one day, but in the short term, whenever I do write a guitar review, I now have all that writing experience behind me which I hope comes across as quality content no AI could ever match. To compliment that, I’ve also built many blogging connections over the years which have produced a significant amount of guest articles.

Too much fiddling with themes?

But actually, maybe this downturn is all my own doing. If I see a blip, I analyse things and experiment with my site to try and correct it, something I’ve jumped into far too early of late.

This knee-jerk reaction of messing about with your site at the first sign of trouble is a surefire way to kill your traffic. It confuses the algorithm.

If traffic is down and it’s not something obvious, the only effective courses of action I’ve discovered are:

a) Write engaging content with an engaging title. Case in point, last year my stats were flagging until ‘Should I Buy a Gibson SG?‘. Maybe I got lucky but it seemed to strike a chord with search engines.

b) Share your content far and wide. Sometimes publishing content isn’t enough, and I’ve found Reddit and Facebook groups to be the best social media platforms for traffic generation. Sometimes you need to lead the horse to water.

Could this be the end of blogging?

Well, despite all of the above, it’s certainly not going to be the end of my blogging. I still enjoy it too much to stop. Will I stop if and when revenue gets to a point of not being able to sustain the site? I don’t think I’ll let it get far, in fact writing this blog is really just the first step in pulling things back around. I just need to muster up enough energy to clear yet another hurdle along the blogging journey, although admittedly this could be the highest one yet.

Sure, I have less time at the moment, but nothing stays the same forever and I can’t see how AI can ever replace the nuances of good human content, no matter how complex and clever it is, although it can and does replicate bad human content no problem!