AI and The End of Blogging

I’ve been working on an article on AI for some time, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. New AI stories come out every day. I’ve decided to break the article into a few distinct parts. That’s easier to handle, especially over the summer, where I am trying to maximize every nice day of weather possible.

About one year ago, I asked if blogging is dead. My main reason for writing it was that Google had switched the focus of the search results. It was never an even playing field, but until the last few years, a small independent brand had a fair chance. Google gradually added more and more shopping results. Huge media conglomerates, such as Dotdash Meredith, started gaming the system. They would buy well-known, trusted brands and publish articles that weren’t exactly relevant to their brands. For example, Better Homes and Gardens may write about how to get a better mortgage rate. They could then sell ads on the page to banks, which pay good money. Even though that’s not their particular expertise, they would appear ahead of an independent blogger who has been writing about such stuff for 18 years now.

Finally, last year, they added AI Overviews. Much of the time, when I am looking for information, the AI result is good enough that I don’t need to scroll and discover a new website. Whenever I do scroll down, I still get the shopping and big media conglomerates. They were kind of new when I wrote that article last June. My traffic has dropped another since 80% then. It’s not a Lazy Man and Money problem. All publishers are getting their traffic taken away. It’s gotten to the point where all hope has been placed on Cloudflare, which will block AI bots by default. The idea is that AI bots will pay publishers to scrape their sites. That could potentially be profitable for me, but I’m sure they already have 18 years of my writing for free.

The Future of Lazy Man (for now)

As regular readers have probably realized, I’m not writing as much. Usually, I’m posting pretty late in the morning/early afternoon on Friday, barely getting an article done for the week. I used to make enough money to qualify this as a job, but now it’s just a hobby. Hobbies simply can’t have the same priority as the other stuff in my life, such as a growing dog boarding business, raising kids, and keeping the house in some kind of order. That’s without my other couple of freelance gigs and management of our tiny real estate “empire” (two properties).

All that said, I can’t close the book on something that I’ve been doing now for 19 years. I think there’s a way to evolve Lazy Man and Money into something that provides more value to readers and earns money. Many bloggers are focusing on their email list. Who needs to rank for search terms in Google if you have loyal readers who subscribe to get your emails? For now, the emails are just the regular posts that I write on the site, but over time, I may write less on the site and more towards that loyal audience. Also, I’m more likely to do giveaways to that audience. So if you want to join the email list, use this form:

I have a few other thoughts on how I can evolve Lazy Man and Money. One of them is to make a course to sell. Many bloggers did this as far back as 10 years ago. I’ve always wanted to keep my writing free. There’s so much information available on the internet (and now through AI) that I feel it has to be something very special to ask you to give your money. I don’t think I have the time to make something that special right now. That could change when my wife retires in a year or two, or as the kids get older and ignore their old man.

The other way I’ve been thinking of evolving Lazy Man and Money is to write and sell a book. I’ve got a lot of material, over 19 years of writing, to work with. Even if 99.9% of my writing has been terrible, the 0.1% of the good stuff could fill a book. I’ve always wanted to write a book, but it’s another thing that takes a lot of time. However, with AI to help me organize it, it’s something that I could do even with limited time. If AI is going to take away my blogging career, I might as well use it to my advantage to become an author. Of course, I would be careful not to create any kind of AI slop.

Finally, I was thinking of writing a series of blog posts. For example, this is the first on AI. I have a bunch of ideas on some other ones. There would be more value to readers of these than my usual articles about my financial journey. That said, my next article is likely to be my August financial review, so those aren’t going away.

If you have any thoughts, leave them in the comments. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

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