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Since I do currently earn money from my programming tutorials, let me tell you about my blog in the late aughts. I wrote hundreds of pieces about language lear

Since I do currently earn money from my programming tutorials, let me tell you about my blog in the late aughts. I wrote hundreds of pieces about language learning, teaching and elementary school-aged education. One benefit from that work was that it helped me grow as a teacher and later as a curriculum designer. But that wasn't the whole thing. I made friends from that blog. I also got emails from teachers living all over the world, asking questions and thanking me for the topic. Cambridge University Press contacted me and purchased rights to some of my writing and distributed it far further than I ever could have. Given the assumption that the content really was useful, more people seeing it meant better educational outcomes for many, many young students that I'll never meet. The reach of media is a multiplier for its impact.

ricardo81 6y ago
It sounds like you made something beneficial for the web in which your peers agreed. How about in 2020, would you agree that the amount of visibility your site gets is dependent on FB and G algos? Even if the content is evergreen? Of course that disregards other sites making new things but I'd say your value is not diminished either way.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this). Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites. The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped. For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content. Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.
eecc 6y ago
That’s great, thanks. But do I need to slaughter and sacrifice my privacy to Facebook and the public space to trolls and fake news optimized for virality? Reach out? Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.

ricardo81 6y ago

It sounds like you made something beneficial for the web in which your peers agreed. How about in 2020, would you agree that the amount of visibility your site gets is dependent on FB and G algos? Even if the content is evergreen? Of course that disregards other sites making new things but I'd say your value is not diminished either way.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this). Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites. The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped. For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content. Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.

eecc 6y ago

That’s great, thanks. But do I need to slaughter and sacrifice my privacy to Facebook and the public space to trolls and fake news optimized for virality? Reach out? Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.