For those that have recently found themselves on Reddit, YouTube and other community posting platforms, you have probably noticed a recurring question constantly popping up within the ‘blogging’ realm:
“Is Blogging Dead”
The reasoning for said question is of course the rise in AI – both from content generation point of view as well as how people source their information and how the likes of Google ‘serve’ that information. Interestingly, the responses on the posts that I have read have been pretty split down the middle of agreeing or disagreeing.
Now, this question is obviously to do with blogging from a revenue generation perspective, as if you write blogs purely as an enjoyable hobby, then the involvement and introduction of AI has no bearing on you posting blogs. Just like computers haven’t stopped people from handwriting if that is what they enjoy doing.
Okay, so let’s talk about it from a revenue generation perspective. It would be wrong of me to not acknowledge that the introduction of AI has had a very real impact on revenue generation for bloggers.
How so?
Bloggers predominantly generate revenue from ad revenue which is conditioned on site visits (impressions) and ad clicks.
With the introduction of AI, people either go straight to the LLM (ChatGPT, CoPilot, Grok etc) and enter their prompts or they still search via a search engine (Google) but the top result is the AI generated snippet which more often than not satisfies the searchers query (zero-click search). This means the blogger’s site that may be showing as result 2, 3 or 4 is no longer getting clicks and thus no ad revenue.
But does that mean that (revenue generating) blogging is dead – No, but it is changing.
It is likely that, at least in the short-term future, traditional site traffic via search engine and subsequent ad revenue is not going to improve. BUT there are alternatives in the works. At this very moment, AI generated content is such a hot talking point, and not necessarily for all the right reasons.
Welcomingly, YouTube recently announced that they would be cracking down on the use of non-original and non-authentic content in their partner program. Cloudflare has also introduced a “pay per crawl” for AI companies crawling sites. These announcements are pretty clear – AI generated content will not be monetised, but real content will be.
I foresee, in the not too distant future, that the likes of Google will introduce a toggle for AI / Real search results. Toggling the real will return the more “traditional” search engine results.
Creative Guess: Google Toggle – AI results or Human Content results
Authors: Take this lull to concentrate on creating high quality content and nurturing your audience. Think more about quality than quantity. It has always been the case that hard work is rewarded, this will be no different. Also – in an effort to make up for lost ad revenue, do not insert more ads on your site!
Food for thought? Let me know in the comments if you agree or not.
