---
title: "blogging in 2024"
description: "Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert..."
date: 2024-08-05
published: true
tags:
  - blog
  - catalytic
  - meta
template: blog-post
---


Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some
time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert
on Shop Talk show, and it made sense.  LLMs and AI is slowly killing the
internet as we know it.

## My metrics

I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results
nearly one year apart.  Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while
clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago.  I'm getting less
impressions and even less clicks.

![blogging-in-2024-20240805080104035.webp](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/2706f990-f2fa-4ccb-a7a9-142ee20686c7.webp)

> May 2023

![blogging-in-2024-20240805080137554.webp](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/cd708a26-27d2-4a33-9f22-b0cb0dd54fc5.webp)

> June 2024

## Suspicions

What I think is happening is a large portion of users are getting their answers
from ChatGPT, Copilot, and llms like this.  A lot of my posts have been filling
gaps in the internet, notes for myself when I struggle to integrate x in y
because there was a gap of how to do so in the docs and stack overflow. Some
small fraction of users have moved on to duck duck go and other non global
warming search engines with AI in their results.

Clicks are down even further, than impressions.  I can't tell for sure but my
gut feeling is that people are using the AI generated results.  I know I use
them quite often, but listening to Justin and Autumn at the end of the latest
ship it podcast <https://changelog.com/shipit/115>, they both claim that they get
no benefits from it and don't know anyone who does.  In fact Justin has taken
the most ethical approach to move to duck duck go since it doesn't kill the
earth with each search by injecting AI results.  Personally I do find it quite
helpful, sometimes the answer is there, or an idea that triggers me to think of
the idea.

## Ok blogging is dead why keep going

Just as always blogging has been for me. It's a great place to write down your
thoughts for later reference, and to help cement them into your brain.  Beyond
getting famous and clicks blogging is useful to you first and foremost, that
should be the number one reason.

## How do we keep the internet of old

RSS feed readers is a great way to keep creators that you like and want to
support in your feed regardless of what the higher powers of search and social
media think of them.  This year I built my own <a href="/reader/" class="wikilink" data-title="Reader" data-description="Latest posts from blogs I follow">Reader</a>, and I use it every
single day to read articles out of my own custom curated feed.

I have also created <a href="/thoughts/" class="wikilink" data-title="Thoughts" data-description="These are generally my thoughts on a web page or some sort of url, except a rare few don&#39;t have a link. These are dual published off of my..." data-date="2024-04-01">Thoughts</a> to help share and lift up creators that make
good posts.  I have a crome extension that allows me to create a blog post tied
to a link right within chrome.  I use this several times per day to save some
pages for later with a small note.