Four Hard-to-Swallow Truths About Blogging in 2025
- bpk298
- May 18
- 10 min read
Updated: May 24
Is blogging dead in 2025? The post-mortem.
When I used my personal Facebook account to announce that I was starting an addiction / recovery blog in 2024, the most common response that I got was "Why a blog?"
"Why not a Substack?" (Discoverability, ability to showcase photographic content, and other formatting freedoms, such as being able to add an e-store, forum, and many other features not available on Substack - but that is another conversation for a different day).
I heard the "Blogging is dead" refrain more than once, too.
I don't regret my decision to start blogging a little over a year ago, and I have achieved - or at least made significant progress toward achieving - key objectives that I established for myself at the outset. I have enjoyed the journey and the connections that I've made along the way, and I've become a better writer and learned much about digital content creation, as well.
However, it's only fair to emphasize that blogging is tough, that it's harder now than ever before, and that it probably isn't right for most people interested in becoming content creators.
If you're wondering whether it's right for you, read on for some unpalatable truths about blogging in this year of our Lord 2025.
Eighty to ninety percent of your time will be spent on promotion rather than content creation.
It's easy to skim through this type of listicle without really digesting what you're reading - I'm guilty of it too - but I'd encourage you to really stop and think about that statement. That creative, rewarding, exciting thing that you're setting out to do ~ writing blog content ~ will occupy a very small proportion of your time. Your research, outlining, drafting, revising, formatting - all of it together will occupy less than 20% of your time.
In 2025, to use a quote that I can't remember the source of, the entire Internet has become a letter from a Nigerian prince. The extent to which Google in particular favors the corporate titans is almost absurd; I've heard several digitally-savvy influencers mention that people who are highly knowledgeable about search algorithms and SEO have turned to other search engines as a result.
As a consequence, if you simply write a beautiful, earnest, original blog and hit "publish," even if you've put some thought into SEO, you're unlikely to get more than a few dozen hits per article at best (your domain authority will be too low, and there are other barriers, as well; in my niche, for example, for-profit rehabs, government entities, and official news sources dominate the search results about addiction and recovery).
For a small, newish blog, I'm doing pretty well in terms of the percentage of traffic that comes from Google and other search engines. However, this simply means that 200 or 300 of the thousands of unique visitors that I get per month arrive at this site via that path, and about 90% of the readers who find the blog this way arrive at a single article about a topic that isn't particularly representative of the rest of my blog.
Because of this, SEO optimization is not a viable way to generate traffic for the first months to years of your blog. Thus, promotion is not about enhancement or supplementation; it is an utter necessity, without which your blog will simply scream (or smile) into the void.
And here's the other thing: The need to promote never ends. Even very successful bloggers admit that, after taking time off from promotion, they experience sudden, drastic drops in readership. The Internet values recency, and nothing stays shiny for long.
Even harder to swallow is the reality that your success will almost certainly depend as much or more on how skilled you are at promotion rather than the quality of your writing and other content. There are countless mediocre writers with successful blogs because they are wizards at self-promotion, but there are virtually no blogs by amazing writers who are terrible at promotion (or rather, there are, but nobody knows about them).
Promoting a blog has never been as difficult as it is in 2025.
We are in the era of microblogging via Facebook, Reddit, Insta, and other platforms. These sites are fiercely protective of their domains, and self-promotion is frowned upon even when it is done responsibly by creators who have been active in these communities for quite some time.
A significant proportion of my readership comes from Reddit. With few exceptions, I hold myself to the high standard of only linking to my blog content when (1) I would've contributed to a discussion anyway; (2) I've summarized the linked content so that anyone who doesn't want to leave Reddit won't have to; and (3) the linked content is too long to post on Reddit or contains photos or other features not compatible with Reddit. I also strive to post at least two comments without links for every one comment that references my blog.
Nevertheless, I lost a very old Reddit account with high karma (mostly from a couple of r/nosleep short stories that topped the charts) because of banning by moderators who were in my opinion grotesquely overprotective of their petty fiefdoms. Mods are not professionals, and their training is limited at best. There is little standardization and no appeal process to give recourse to people subject to lousy moderation calls; moreover, because these sites view any clicks to off-site resources as lost traffic, they're not likely to be sympathetic to bloggers, anyway.
Add to this the fact that the algorithms for Facebook, Insta, and other platforms where the action is hide content that links to blogs and other outside sites, and you can begin to appreciate how difficult it can be to promote your content.
Now, it's true here - as it almost always is in life - that if you've got money to spend on paid advertising, that opens the door to easier and more effective promotion. However, it's certainly not guaranteed that you'll recoup that cash outflow in income from advertising, sponsors, or other revenue sources, which means that - in addition to the $200-400 yearly minimum that you'll likely be spending on a domain, hosting through a service like Wix, and other costs, you'll be out advertising costs, as well.
Your best bet for free promotion of your blog is probably the video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Human beings are vision-dominant creatures, and we are indisputably in the era of short-form, video content; even 30-minute YouTube reviews are starting to look passé.
However, even if you have the (very different) filming and video editing skillsets needed to succeed on these platforms, there are issues with relying on them to promote your blog, including that (1) long-form, written content doesn't necessarily translate well into short-form, video content, which doesn't leave much room for nuance, extended argument, and linguistic virtuosity, and (2) building a YouTube channel also requires promotion on Reddit, Facebook groups, and the other platforms mentioned above.
A brief bit of advice: Before you begin your blog, come up with a promotion plan - a spreadsheet or other document that has sections for each platform that you will be active on, with space to copy / paste the written content that you're using and to track what works and what doesn't.
Collaborating with other content creators, including podcast hosts, people with YouTube channels, Insta influencers, and more, can provide a way to cross-pollinate your audiences to maximize your reach, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that not many people will want to collab with you until you've built enough of a platform that they will view you as having similar clout to them (or at least as up-and-coming).
Blogging is one of the slowest ways to make money through digital content creation, period.
If your primary goal is to make money online, blogging is almost certainly the worst option for you.
Blogging is a slow-burn medium. It takes years to build up a loyal readership even when you're consistently publishing quality content, promoting enthusiastically, and optimizing your content to coincide with social media trends and other salient developments.
To achieve the approximately 10,000+ sessions per month goal at which MediaVine advertising reportedly becomes a possibility* requires dedicating 15-20+ hours per week to a blog that might not become profitable for years and that will almost certainly never become profitable enough to allow you to live off of it.
*Google AdSense is another advertising program that is available to blogs with much more modest traffic; however, because Google AdSense's ads are considered to be lower quality, less tailored to viewers' interests / preferences, and lower yield in terms of pay per 1,000 views, MediaVine is vastly preferable to most bloggers.
Compare this to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, on which dedicated creators who are consistent and who "blow up" can easily make enough to go professional within a year or two (and they will make more money from virtually every revenue source than bloggers of a comparable prominence, as well). Again, we're in the era of short-form, digital content, and the slice of the pie represented by long-form, written content like blogging is just too small to be significantly profitable for the vast majority of creators.
As discussed above, as a blogger in 2025, you're going to have to be active on these other platforms anyway, which begs the question - why not just put your time and energy into creating higher-yield content there?
Having said all of that, blogging provides a valuable opportunity to cultivate a highly loyal, differentiated following that will stay dedicated to you and your content for years or even decades. You can have extended, nuanced conversations with such a readership; community members who contribute often get to know each other, and inside jokes and camaraderie abound.*
*Podcasting is another content creation option that pays much better than blogging and that allows for in-depth discussion of different issues, so you might want to consider that as an alternative to blogging, as well.
This type of dynamic, in addition to being highly rewarding, is invaluable for writers, whose success is contingent upon building this kind of following (rather than on getting millions of clicks from people who might have only a passing interest in their content or who might be watching it out of morbid curiosity, schadenfreude, or even dislike).
An average debut novel published through the traditional publishing industry is considered successful if it sells just 500 to 750 copies; thus, even a small blog following can have huge implications for professional success in certain fields. (Similarly, if you use your blog to find clients for your consulting company, for example, you might only have 200 regular readers, but if 10 of them become high-value accounts, they might provide a substantial enough income to survive on!).
In a certain significant way, blogging is dead in 2025.
I read a very interesting retrospective on the original wave of mommy bloggers, including Heather Armstrong (Dooce)* and Cecily Kellogg.
*Heather was a gifted writer and brilliant businesswoman who committed suicide in 2023, partly due to harassment stemming from GOMI and other online platforms. She discussed having been addicted to Adderall (amphetamines) and other hard drugs, and she wrote a book called The Valedictorian of Being Dead about undergoing experimental treatment for her depression.
One of these flawed, deeply witty, and iconoclastic women mentioned that visiting her friends' blogs during the early aughts had felt like stopping by a friend's place for a chat and finding that a few other friends were visiting as well (and that others would call later to catch up on the latest gossip).
The comments sections of these heyday blogs had dozens of regular posters, and popular articles would have dozens or hundreds of comments below them, with many chains of commentors replying to each other. In short, the same types of impassioned conversations that now happen on Facebook and Insta were being conducted in the spaces provided by these bloggers beneath their articles.
These OG bloggers commanded readerships that numbered in the millions. They were able to secure six-figure brand sponsorships as well as book deals and product lines. Their cultural influence was huge, and - because the Internet was still in its infancy in many ways - they were actually able to be themselves; the overly polished, bland "professionalism" of today's mainstream digital content creators is lame by comparison.
Make no mistake: The glory days of the personal blog are over. People spend their time on microblogging platforms, where they can access diverse content algorithmically tailored to their interests and needs.
These days, few readers are willing to regularly visit a site run by and devoted to the content of a single creator; unless the blogger in question is famous or has very specialized credentials relevant to the subject matter, the request to do so seems almost narcissistic by the standards of today's internet culture. Fewer still are willing to pay for that content.
Even world-renowned authors and prominent figures from the arts and politics have limited traffic and engagement on their blogs. Personal blogging as a mainstream cultural phenomenon is, in fact, DOA in 2025, but blogs devoted to various niche interests, to business entities, and to nonprofit organizations / institutions are carrying the blogging torch forward.
Final thoughts: If you've read all of the above and still believe that blogging is a viable option for you, I'd highly encourage you to come up with a "business plan" for your blog. Identify your readership, target their needs, research your competitors and decide what will make you different from them. Come up with a promotion plan involving at least two other platforms that you will be active on. Set three to five concrete goals for your first 12 to 18 months, and allow yourself to imagine an ideal case of where you'll be in four to five years.
The alternative to this - for someone who truly just wants to have a fun, creative outlet where they can say all of the things that they have bottled up inside - is just to start a small, personal blog and totally ignore promotion. Who knows - maybe the right person will stumble across your content one day, and, through the strange, asymmetric magic of the Internet, you'll blow up despite it all!
I have received dozens of meaningful, heartfelt messages of thanks and appreciation from my blog readers over the past year or so. They are among the most impactful communications of my life, as are the conversations in which I helped to support and guide fellow addicts (or their family members) who were in crisis. With respect to writing in my mental health niche in particular, there is something so powerful and liberating about sharing your worst weaknesses, humiliations, and failures - and discovering that people love and appreciate you nonetheless!
I have gained a couple of true friendships from the deal, as well.
I don't believe that many people will find blogging as satisfying as I do in 2025, but there is an intangible, human value to my connections with my readers that outweighs all of the drawbacks discussed above and that makes this blog well worth my time, every time.
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