Why People Quit Blogging

2026-08-27


The Bridge Over “Content Marketing” Bulls***

Introduction

I went down a rabbit hole recently, or at least I tried to. I found it difficult to come up with the information needed to write about the topic I was researching. But while I did my research a different topic came up: Why People Quit Blogging. Then, as chance would have it, a post crossed my attention on Bubbles: Bye, bye, Bear Blog!¹. I, of course, responded to the article and attempted to inspire the author to keep going. But, as an update on the post would have it, they are still planning to stop writing, quite literally at the one-year mark.

There has also been talk about meta blogging (ie, blogging about blogging). This article falls into that category. There is also some talk about the quality of posts, some posts about making our blogs more interactive, and some about making them more interlinked. All of these are topics that I have interest in talking about, but I will save them for another time.

For now, I want to turn to the topic of why people quit blogging. I think it is a more important topic, especially in light of the Bye, bye, Bear Blog article. After all: if people quit blogging, talking about post quality, interlinking, and being interactive is kind of pointless. And, I think there are low value articles that are doing a lot of damage to would-be bloggers.

The Articles

An article by Nadia Alimi titled Why Most People Quit Blogging After just a year (And How to Avoid It)². Came up during my research for my unnamed project. During my research I kept running into a bunch of extremely low-value posts. Posts using many SEO tricks just to score highly in search results. In Nadia Alimi’s case, I figured they had done some keyword targeting to cause their article to turn up in my search results, despite it being unrelated to my research. However, I was intrigued enough to click on the link. (So, yeah, SEO tricks do work sometimes.)

And, as I suspected, Ms. Alimi is in fact running a business that centers around the subject of blogging. She is running a business convincing people they can make money by blogging. Exactly as I thought it would be.

I decided to turn away from my research briefly to examine this topic a bit. What I found was surprising. First, when I searched for “why people quit blogging” Ms. Alimi’s article didn’t turn up on page one of my search results. That is funny, in my opinion. It’s obvious that “blogging” and “quit” are so heavily competitive that she decided to target other keywords instead.

So, what did that first page of results look like? Well, here’s a list of the articles that turned up:

More and more people are ditching blogging (and I can see why)³
The Real Reason Most People Quit Blogging (And How to Avoid It)⁴
Why do people quit blogging? (8 Reasons)⁵
Why I Quit Blogging (Don’t Make These Mistakes)⁶
Blogging is not dead, just evolved. Learn how to thrive in the new era of blogging and SEO.⁷
Why I Quit Blogging (Is It Your Turn Next?)⁸
The End of Blogging (for Me)⁹
Are people still reading blogs? I have always loved the idea of running a blog, however with today’s e-commerce and numbers focused mindset, I’m not sure if people willingly follow blogs.¹⁰

Want to know the truth about all nine of these “articles” (including Ms. Alimi’s article)? They are self-serving pieces of garbage. Don’t get me wrong, they are structured in a way that will make you think they are answering the question. And, in a respect, they are. However, there is a major issue with all of them: they lack credible information.

The point of the articles isn’t to share genuine, useful information with the reader. Instead, they are an exercise is SEO supremacy, generating traffic for the authors' website. And the result is, they get the opportunity to sell their services. But, if these articles are all about generating website traffic, what are they basing their writing on? And what advice should they have been giving instead?

The “Content” Problem

Many of these websites will take as little as a single source of information, or a handful of sources, and spin a narrative that (at least on a surface level) seems to be aligned with their source(s). The sources are articles like:

Latest blogging statistics and facts for 2026¹¹
The 12th Annual Blogger Survey: What Content Works in 2025?¹²
25 Up-To-Date Blogging Statistics¹³
Blogging Statistics 2026: Trends, Growth & Insights¹⁴

Readers who are less than familiar with the subject of blogging don’t catch on to what they are looking at. They see a list of sources, and think the author has done a lot of research, and has the intent of boiling down the information into a more digestible form. So, they read the article, and are met with topics that seem to align with the information they are looking for. Topics like:

Unreal expectations about time and results
Overwhelming pressure
Writing becomes an obligation
Isolation and low or no feedback
Life interferes with blogging
No goals, lack of direction
Technical issues

It’s almost like the would-be author is being handed a check-list of things to avoid. And, depending on if the articles' author went the extra step, they continue with a list of things the would-be author should be doing:

Defining clear goals
Decide on a comfortable publishing schedule
Don’t try to be perfect, just publish
Connect with other bloggers
Make certain to have guilt-free time away

And while all of this might seem like good advice, there is an underlying premise that has been totally obscured from the reader. The underlying premise is that all these would-be bloggers are doing it because they want financial gains of some sort. The assumption is that the audience is “content marketers” and not ordinary people.

This is what you learn if you dig into the references that these articles are based on. The references will tell you things like:

Content drives blogging statistics 2025. Avg post: 1,394–2,330 words (up 57.4% since 2015). High-rankers: 1,140–1,285 words. 75% prefer under 1,000; >3,000 convert best. Guides/how-tos: 1,500–2,500. Only 3% write 3,000+.¹⁴
84% of B2C marketers claim to have used blogs on corporate websites to distribute content in the past 12 months, making it the second most popular distribution channel behind organic social media (Content Marketing Institute)¹³
Producing and promoting content is a big job and a long-term commitment. Content feeds the email program and social streams, it connects the brand to influencers, it builds awareness, trust and loyalty. Content also trains the AI language models.¹²

In other words: this is all about the industry, and not about the person. These articles aren’t written to encourage people that want to find other readers. They are written for people that want to build a business, for people that want to find customers to sell a product or service to.

The fact that the authors of these articles go to some length to obscure their underlying motives says more about who they are. In a good scenario they are running low quality businesses that offer services no one really needs. In a bad scenario they are outright scammers.

A Side Story

I met someone who runs one of these businesses. A low-quality “side hustle” that had I known about, I never would have hired him for a different job. (He had basically built several side businesses. But I had hired him for his primary business. That business required specific certifications and insurance, which he had.)

His approach was this: he did research by watching public records. Any new businesses he saw applying for licenses, or permits, etc. he checked to see if they had a website. If they didn’t, he fed the business name into a program that generated domain names the business would want. He then purchased the top 5–10 domains.

Next he would contact the business and offer his service to build a website for them, with the promise of excellent SEO, support, and so on. If the business turned him down, he backed off and waited for them to come back to buy the domain. At that point, he made a high-pressure pitch to build the businesses' website. If they still didn’t want his service, he would “sell” the domain, generally at a heavily marked up price, but keep the domain under his own control as the registrar.

He didn’t know jack s*** about building websites. He knew how to use a page builder and had a buddy that bought white label hosting, and helped build the sites. (This buddy also handled the domain record updates for people wanting to use their own website designers.) Several hundred small businesses use him for their websites. His estimated net income from this business is around $80-90K per month. The man is a literal millionaire, and if you saw him walking down the street you would never guess what he did.

He is the kind of person that has a website with articles like “Why Bloggers Quit After A Year”. It’s not about helping anyone. It’s about scaring people into using his service.

End of rant / side story.

What’s the Real Advice Then?

The Indieweb isn’t about running a business. At least, not the kind of business that is “content marketing” based. Or, at least, I hope that’s true. That isn’t to say I’m against any commerce going on in this space. I’m just hopeful that it’s more personal, and not the kind of stuff propagated by content marketing.

(Let me provide some examples. There are several people on Mastodon: authors, artists, illustrators, etc. that make their wares available online and post about them. But, they don’t just post about their wares. They post about numerous other topics as well. And, much to my surprise, after I purchased my typewriter¹⁵, I found that the seller has a Bear Blog¹⁶. This is all amazing - I love dealing directly with people, especially people with specific talents.)

Now, after blogging for over a decade, I have some thoughts on how to approach online writing. And, the irony is, I would almost structure it similar to one of these scam articles, but without the implied moneymaking BS. Here are some thoughts for someone who isn’t a writer that wants to start writing online.

1. Understand Where You Are Starting From

Many of these articles will make suggestions like “define clear goals,” or “understand who you are writing for”. But, if you are starting from the beginning you probably don’t know what your goals are. Or, if you think you have a goal, you are likely just throwing ideas out there to just experiment.

All of that is fine. Write about anything you want to write about. You don’t have to have a theme, or a direction, or anything, really. The only thing you need is a desire to write something. Just know that you are starting something new, and it will take you time to find your way in the blogging space.

A tiny aside. Several years ago I decided to remove a bunch of posts from one of my blogs. They were early posts I wrote when I didn’t have a direction. I archived them on another blog that I don’t advertise (I don’t even know if I can still log into it). I came across it recently, and I re-read a couple of the posts. They made me cringe. But, I’m happy I wrote them. They were a large part of where I started, and now I can see the progress I’ve made over the last decade. And I can see how I’ve developed as a person, the changes in my thought processes, beliefs, and more.

That’s where I believe new bloggers should start: write anything. It can be personal, it can be dreams, observations, it can be about your research, or things you admire. Literally anything. Eventually you will find what you are comfortable writing, and you’ll be able to look back and understand yourself a little better.

2. Don’t Put Pressure on Yourself

A lot of these articles will talk about having a “schedule that doesn’t put pressure on you”. That’s mostly correct. I’d recommend not having a schedule. Think of writing instead as a recreation, a hobby. You know you will have periods when you don’t have time for your hobbies, and other times you will. So, make writing one of your hobbies.

And, don’t think that just because you are making time for your hobby that you have to produce something. It’s perfectly acceptable to spend a few hours writing and decide that you don’t want to publish what you’ve written. It’s also fine to realize that what you have written has problems and isn’t exactly what you want to say and publish it anyway.

Blogging is about you, it’s about your process, it’s about what you are getting from it. It’s not about being perfect, or expecting the rest of the world to agree with you. (I can almost guarantee there will be people that won’t agree with you.)

3. Don’t Expect an Audience

While you can do things to help with building an audience, such as joining Bubbles¹⁷ you don’t have to do that. You don’t need anyone to read your blog, if you don’t want them to.

Another side story. Years ago I found a music podcast was unlike any music podcast I’d ever encountered. It was just a new piece of music every day. It was a one-person show, and he kept doing this podcast for over twelve years.

After a while he started bundling up all the music he’d released and uploaded it to the Internet Archive¹⁸. There are now over 200 releases, many of them containing more than 15 tracks. And guess what? I just found that he is still producing music under another alias. Still as obscure as before, and still only seeing (mostly) single digit downloads.

The point is: he doesn’t predicate the joy he gets in making music on people listening to it. He’s happy just to put out a release when he can. It doesn’t matter if 5 people hear it, or 100 people hear it. He doesn’t expect an audience.

4. Don’t Invest Too Much

Don’t spend a lot of money on writing online. In fact, you don’t have to spend any. There are plenty of free options, like Bear Blog¹⁹ for getting started. Don’t worry about having a lot of fancy bells-and-whistles. Just sit down and write.

Why do I recommend not spending money on your blogging platform? Because it can turn this activity from a hobby into an obligation in your mind. If you spend money on something, many of us tend to want to think we are getting the most value out of our purchase. In the case of blogging, you may start to feel that you have invested so much that you need to write more to make it worth paying for.

And that can have negative effects on your writing. Writing as an obligation instead of as an activity that adds value to your life can add pressure and stress. If you aren’t paying for your blog, you don’t have to worry about how often you write, or that you aren’t getting value out of it. You measure the value by what you do, on your own terms.

5. Don’t Worry About the Tech

If anything, look for the option that is easiest to use. Don’t look at feature lists and think X has more features than Y. Measuring a blogging platform that way is a sure way to disincentivize yourself. I am literally speaking about this from experience.

The blogging platform I used to use added all sorts of whiz-bang features to it after I’d been using it for over five years. But, as they added more and more features, the less I was motivated to use it. All the new features pushed away the features that I wanted, and made it less intuitive for me to use. Once I moved to a platform with fewer features, I was able to start writing again. I just configured the site to look how I wanted, and now I am writing nearly daily again.

6. Don’t Use AI

I didn’t mention this earlier, but AI is becoming more prevalent in those “content marketing” surveys. It appears that content marketers are trying to cut down the time it takes them to write a post by using AI, instead of working through all the writing themselves. And I get it, there are some cases that AI could make sense, but not for your personal blog.

On your personal blog you want to develop your own voice. Some of the best blogs I have ever read are from people that have their own, unique style of writing. (This was before AI was a consideration.) I loved the cadences in their language, I loved the metaphors that show how the author thought, I loved the jokes they came up with. It’s all unique, and specific to them. But with AI, a lot of that is lost, or watered down. That’s not what you want to put out there in the world. Your blog should be your experience, your perspective, written in your unique voice. Not something created through an automation process to sound professional or academic.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t use any tools. I write all my posts in Obsidian²⁰, and I use a few tools with it to help me strengthen my writing:

Harper²¹ by Automattic
LanguageTool²²
Obsidian’s built-in Spell Checker

That’s it. Those three tools really help me catch a lot of the mistakes I routinely make, while not interfering with my writing style.

I don’t use the online version of LanguageTool as it now has an AI based tool that does “paraphrasing”. Instead, I use the self-hosted version. It doesn’t have a lot of the features included in the subscription service, but it’s enough for me. It’s up to you if you feel you need to use a subscription based grammar checker service.

7. Time Based Goals

One of the few things that is a good takeaway from all the source articles cited by the low-effort blogs is that people tend to quit in about the 12-18 month range. I cited an example of this at the very start of this article: a person was giving up on their blog at exactly the one-year mark.

Personally, I went for years with one of my blogs only getting single digit readership. Oh, the numbers looked actually looked a lot higher. But, when I checked more closely, I found that there were a lot of bots and scrapers that were (for some weird reason) scraping my blog - despite it being focused on a topic that had a very niche appeal. (And again, this was before AI.)

But now, after a decade I have anywhere from a few dozen readers, to hundreds of readers for my blogs (yes, plural). And, I’ve even been hit with tens of thousands of views when a couple of my posts hit the front page of Hacker News.

The point is, if I had given up after six, twelve, or eighteen months I would have lost out on a lot. I wouldn’t have developed my writing style, I wouldn’t be as good at doing research and writing long essays. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have found more like-minded people, or even more people that disagree with me. All of this has made the years I’ve spent working on my blogs worth it to me: so don’t worry about how long it takes, it can be beneficial.

8. Don’t Become Obsessed with Numbers

This, if anything, is one of my biggest blogging flaws. I love watching the numbers: seeing how many people read the articles, seeing where they are coming from, getting an idea if they are looking at more than one article when they visit. But that’s me. When I started one of my blogs years ago I had a mission statement for it. I tried to use the numbers to measure the progress I was making on my mission.

Of course, the numbers lied. People weren’t really finding my writing, it was mostly bots, but I didn’t know that at the time. Realizing that the numbers were lying to me really hit me hard.

So, don’t watch the numbers. Don’t get invested in them. And most importantly: don’t use them as a measure of your success (or lack of success). That’s not what’s important.

9. No Idea Is Too Small

At first, you might think you are going to run out of ideas to write about on your blog. But if you keep going, you will find there are infinite topics for you to write about. The key to finding that infinite well of writing is quite simple: keep a list of ideas. They will come to you randomly, or you might sit down and just brainstorm either alone or with someone else to come up with ideas.

The ones that stick with me the most are the ones that come up randomly throughout the day, or just before I go to bed. I just write down these ideas in a list. Currently, that list is sitting at over forty article ideas. Some of them I have been actively working on for a while now, and some are brand new. And, there are still others that I haven’t added to the list yet (I have a stub entry for a series of posts - so I won’t forget it).

Another thing that will happen is when you are researching or writing one article, you will suddenly find a topic that’s too big to include in your current work. That’s how this post was born. I was doing research about a statistic that has been reported for over a decade without significant change. While I was doing that research, the article by Nadia Alimi² came up in my search results. I knew the topic of “why bloggers quit” was too large for the article I was writing, so I saved the idea. Then the Bye, bye Bear Blog!¹ popped up, so I linked it in as part of this topic.

It’s funny the way these things work out sometimes.

Now, I’ll be the first to say, some ideas just won’t work out. I’ve deleted at least a dozen ideas from my list in the last month or so. I took some time with them, did some research, and decided: (a) there wasn’t enough for me to work with, (b) I didn’t have anything to say, or (c) some topics that are too personal for me to put online. And that’s okay. Not every idea is going to generate a post that is going to be submitted for a Pulitzer Prize.

Conclusion

Don’t pay attention to the river of “content marketing” bulls*** that is out there. While their advice may appear to be good at first, it is all predicated on the idea that you want to make money from your blogging. Don’t make that a goal. Instead, look at a blog as a way to develop yourself. Look at it as a hobby that you can do in your spare time without pressure, without a schedule, or any of the other malarkey these blogs are trying to sell you.

I offer advice from personal experience, instead of looking at some article or set of statistics. I’ve met at least one person who exemplified the kind of person that writes these “Why bloggers quit” articles. He was a despicable person. The only category of people I hate more are hardened criminals.

To summarize my advice for new bloggers:

Avoid putting pressure on yourself, keep blogging as an enjoyable hobby.
Spend as little as possible, and don’t get caught up in the technology.
Don’t expect an audience, and don’t have unrealistic time-based goals.
Don’t measure statistics on your site. Don’t use the numbers to measure your progress.
Understand yourself and where you are starting from.
Don’t use AI, you want your blog to be 100 percent you.
No idea is too small. Keep a list of ideas, and feel free to throw out any that don’t work for you.

I know I’ve blathered a lot in this post, but I hope you have gained some insight or knowledge into blogging, what it is really about, and ignoring the river of content marketing manure.