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I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

48 points13 hoursresobscura.substack.com
simonw3 hours ago

Turns out I've linked to you five times since 2023! https://simonwillison.net/tags/benjamin-breen/

(A neat thing about having tags for people I link to is that it's easier to spot when I become a repeat-linker.)

peterspath2 hours ago

I do the same thing on my blog... have a taxonomy for people, countries, trails I hike, and national parks. Custom taxonomies are a good way to organise your blog.

protocolture3 hours ago

>I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

100% agree.

Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?

pixodaros3 hours ago

A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

N_Lens2 hours ago

Just in time to be scooped up in AI training sets!

manwithmanyface2 hours ago

Okay

colesantiago2 hours ago

35 subscribers out of 8,000 seems to be very low, especially for 15 years.

Do most people actually pay and support most newsletters? Wouldn't it be more stable income to have sponsors or commercial sponsors?

beritdotdev3 hours ago

[dead]

beritdotdev3 hours ago
tomhow2 hours ago

This is not allowed on HN so we've banned the account. You're welcome to register a new account if you want to post human-generated comments.