News from home is another story. I’m from Georgia, the country, not the US state, and there people tend to be either for the government or against it, with almost nothing in between. You can see it clearly in the media. Two outlets can cover exactly the same story in completely different ways. It annoys me every single time. From what I read, the US isn’t so different.

Ask the internet why outlets do this, and the answer is simple: anger sells. Oxford University Press even made “rage bait” its word of the year for 2025, after the term’s use tripled in twelve months.

So when I came across a study of 22,743 headline experiments, I thought I knew how it would end. Anger is a drive. It’s energy, it makes people feel something, and nobody really expects to feel happy or satisfied reading the news. I’d have bet on the angry headlines.

I’d have lost.

Between January 2013 and April 2015, the website Upworthy tested different headlines for the same story on different readers, chosen at random, and counted the clicks. In a 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour, Claire Robertson, Jay Van Bavel and colleagues went through those tests. Negative words did win clicks: in an average 15-word headline, each negative word raised the click rate by about 2.3%. But when they split negativity into emotions, sadness words raised clicks, fear and joy words lowered them, and anger words made no measurable difference.

This was Upworthy, which the authors call “one of the most successful pioneers of click-bait in the history of the Internet.” Each result is about a headline, not a person, and a click isn’t a share. The authors also say their test couldn’t prove anger has no effect at all, only that they couldn’t find one.

So if anger doesn’t get the click, what keeps people coming back to outlets that make them angry? I asked the researchers who study it.

Anger clearly pays someone. But who’s buying?

Gregory Martin is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. With Ali Yurukoglu, he wrote a 2017 study of bias in cable news. He told me straight away that he isn’t a psychologist. He can think of people he knows who “seem, by revealed preference, to enjoy getting angry at a television,” he said, “but I don’t have a great insight into why that is.”

“Anger is a politically useful emotion, and it’s clear enough why political elites would want to stimulate anger among their base of support, but less clear why the base would want to tune in for that.” — Gregory Martin, Stanford Graduate School of Business

This is the part I keep coming back to. Anger clearly works for the people selling it. For the rest of us, it means choosing, again and again, to feel worse. So either anger gives us something we want, like that jolt of energy I mentioned, or it isn’t really the anger we come back for.

Angry headlines doubled in 20 years. Why?

Outlets certainly sell more of it. David Rozado and colleagues had language models label 23 million headlines from 47 popular US outlets, from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines labelled angry rose by 104%. Fear rose by 150% and sadness by 54%, while neutral headlines fell by 30%.

Diego García, a finance professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has seen a similar shift on TV. In “Selling anger”, a working paper with Ryan Lewis and Maximilian Rohrer, he went through closed captions from six cable networks between 2012 and 2024. The networks increasingly talked about the opposing party. In 2024, Fox covered Democrats 60% of the time, and MSNBC did the reverse.

I asked him why. “I can only speculate here, as our paper is purely observational,” he said. Social media took off at the start of their data, and “what this allowed media companies to do was to run A-B tests to see what type of stories would increase engagement (hours in the app). They must have figured out talking trash about the opposition works best!?” He was careful about it: “No scientific basis for the above claim, but it resonates. It was impossible (or very hard) to do A-B testing in 2005. By 2015 it was close to trivial.”

Which made me smile a little, because Upworthy’s archive is exactly that kind of A-B test. And in those tests, anger on its own didn’t win. Something else did.

Maybe it’s not the anger, but who it’s aimed at

In a 2021 study in PNAS, Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden looked at 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts from US news outlets and members of Congress. For the news outlets’ accounts, each word about the opposing political side raised shares by 35 to 57%. On those outlets’ Facebook pages, “angry” was the most common reaction, for liberal and conservative outlets alike. Across all the accounts, words about the other side predicted shares about 4.8 times as strongly as negative words did.

The paper lists some of the most-shared posts, and they read like what I scroll past every day. One of them, from a conservative outlet: “Every American needs to see Joe Biden’s latest brain freeze.” One from a liberal outlet: “Vice President Mike Pence blatantly lied to reporters about the trajectory of COVID-19 cases in Oklahoma […]”

When I asked Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, whether a shared opponent is what keeps an audience coming back, he answered: “Yes, negativity and outgroup animosity both drive engagement.”

Daniel Mochon, a marketing professor at Tulane who studies why people engage with posts they disagree with, had a similar feeling. “I am not sure I know the answer,” he said. “However, my intuition is that audiences return to outlets that make them angry because it feels good to confront and stand up to people they disagree with. The problem is that it is unclear whether this kind of confrontation benefits anyone.”

This sounded familiar. Back home, when two outlets cover the same story in completely different ways, each one is really telling a story about the other side. It might also explain why the two studies don’t clash.

A click is something you do alone. A share is something you do in front of everyone.

Why the angry channel can feel like home

Erin Cikanek, a political scientist and Klarman Fellow at Cornell, measures emotion in TV news. In one sample, 27 of 30 Fox News prime-time segments on 4 and 5 January 2021 were angry in tone. I asked whether viewers come back for the shared feeling or for the information.

“People will rely on their social identities – partisanship – to make choices about media,” she said. She couldn’t point to work that separates the two, but she guessed “it is some combination of the two: information that does not challenge prior beliefs and emotions that allow them to do the same and rely on political habits in line with their partisan identities.”

Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po who co-wrote the book Changing Minds or Changing Channels?, said there isn’t a simple answer. “For some it becomes a habit; for some, it is something they truly enjoy; for others, they do it to prepare for what they fear will be the worst.”

Back in 2014, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj had interviewed fans of outrage shows for their book The Outrage Industry. Those shows, they wrote, “function as safe havens for audience members increasingly uncomfortable” with real-world political conversations.

A safe haven that makes you angry sounds strange at first. But if everyone around you is angry at the same people, at least you know where you stand.

We keep watching. That doesn’t mean we like it

In a 2025 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which Van Bavel sent me, he and Rathje point to a survey of 511 Americans. People knew divisive content goes viral, and most of them didn’t want it to. The authors call this the paradox of virality: “widely shared content is not necessarily widely liked.” Some of us may dwell on a post, they write, much as people feel they “cannot look away from a car crash on the side of the road.”

Arceneaux added a flip side: “many people choose to avoid the news because it makes them upset.”

I’m probably closer to that second group. I don’t really hate-read. I try to keep my nervous system sane.

Still, keep in mind that nobody here followed the same people’s loyalty to one outlet over months. Upworthy counted clicks, the PNAS study counted shares, and several of the answers above are the researchers’ own guesses, which they said themselves.

I started out sure that anger was the hook. Now I suspect it’s more like the packaging. What’s inside is the other side, the people who agree with us, and the habit of checking in. The next time a Georgian headline annoys me, I think I’ll ask not what it says, but who it wants me to stand next to.

Sources:

• Robertson et al., Negativity drives online news consumption, Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.
• Rathje et al., Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media, PNAS, 2021.
• Rozado et al., Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models, PLOS ONE, 2022.
• Rathje and Van Bavel, The psychology of virality, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2025.
• García et al., Selling anger, SSRN working paper, 2025.

The post If you think anger is what keeps us going back to outlets that make us furious, 22,743 headline tests suggest otherwise. Researchers think the real hook is the other side appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The Daily Wire is a conservative media company founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro, a podcaster and commentator, and Jeremy Boreing, who ran it as chief executive until the company parted ways with him in 2025. It sells paid memberships that give access to podcasts, commentary shows and films.

Paid subscriptions make up about three quarters of the company’s revenue, the documents show. Advertising, about a fifth of revenue, has fallen every year since 2022.

Semafor also reported that the company was in talks with Highmount Capital, an investment firm founded by two former employees of Koch Industries, the industrial conglomerate, to lead a funding round of at least $100mn at a $750mn valuation. The company told investors it made $48mn in adjusted EBITDA in 2025, a measure of profit before certain costs, on revenue above $200mn.

The documents cannot settle why the subscribers left. Did they go because the political moment changed, with the party the Daily Wire opposes out of power in Washington, or because of choices the company made?

The investor memo prepared by Highmount puts some of the blame on a company choice: the Pendragon Cycle, a seven-episode Arthurian fantasy series. The memo says the series did not fully land with the Daily Wire’s core audience and “consumed the majority of the 2025 content budget, leaving fewer resources for new programming that could drive subscriber acquisition and marketing.” The company spent $50mn on it, the memo said.

Nieman Lab, a journalism site at Harvard, quoted Dylan Byers of Puck, a subscription news site, as reporting that Boreing began work on the series in 2023 with an eight-figure budget and ended up spending nearly three times what had been approved.

Max Tani, Semafor’s media editor, wrote that the audience decline “could be a blip attributed more to a reduction in content and paid marketing dollars.”

The other reading rests on timing. The New York Times reported in July that the conservative media world around Trump was starting to splinter, and that experts pointed to a number of reasons, including the difficulty of stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington and a quieter midterm season. Shapiro lost about 60,000 YouTube subscribers between April and June, the paper said, citing Chaotic Era, a newsletter about online influence. The Times said his weekly YouTube views had fallen to about 4mn from 27mn in 2024.

Semafor’s own report said the split between Shapiro and others on the online right could put off part of the audience. It noted that Shapiro had clashed with Candace Owens, a former Daily Wire employee, and with the media personalities Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

A.J. Bauer, assistant professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama, said in an email that he had no data on whether a conservative outlet’s pull depends on being in opposition. He said he saw no reason to suspect that audiences are more or less interested when their party is out of power, though he imagined it might be one of many factors in how outlets on the right decide what to cover.

He also said the question ran together two separate problems, falling subscribers and pressure on profitability. “I don’t think Pendragon would cause a drop in subscribers or audiences, since it’s not out yet,” he said. The Highmount memo, for its part, says the series did not fully win over the core Daily Wire audience. Bauer said the production costs weighed on the company’s profitability and fed into this year’s layoffs.

“I think declining audiences/subscribers is overdetermined,” Bauer said. He listed changes to Facebook’s algorithm, which he said hit the Daily Wire and Shapiro harder than rivals because they had relied more on Facebook for distribution. He listed a shift in public opinion on US support for Israel, which he called a core issue for Shapiro, and said Carlson had played to that shift while Shapiro would not because of his ideological commitments. His third factor was crowding. He said “the right-wing media market is more over-saturated than ever”, leaving outlets struggling to hold audiences who have a seemingly unending supply of alternatives if a commentator bores them.

Reece Peck, associate professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and author of Fox Populism, said in an email that two things matter most when comparing the Daily Wire’s position with that of Fox News, the cable channel: the age of its audience and the platform it depends on.

“Fox’s core audience is older, hardcore Republican partisans, mostly from the Boomer generation. They’re less likely to change their media diets or their political views, whether a Republican is in power or not,” Peck said. “The Daily Wire’s audience skews much younger.”

Fox has the fees cable operators pay to carry the channel and corporate advertising behind it, he said. Every internet media operation, whatever its politics, has to piece together a more complex and precarious revenue model, Peck said. “That’s nothing like the steady income cable provides.”

On who the enemy is now, Peck said that was the Daily Wire’s problem. “The enemy that built the company isn’t hitting the way it used to,” he said. Baby boomers tend to stick with Trump, he said, while younger conservatives are more willing to criticise him and the younger podcast world has started openly opposing him.

Shapiro made his name debating young progressives on college campuses, and the company branded itself as the home of free speech and anti-wokeness, Peck said. He said the playbook worked in a more comfortable economy and a time of relative peace, and lands less well now that AI, war and economic anxiety weigh on people.

While subscriptions were falling, the company tried a one-time product. On 29 October 2025 it announced a DailyWire+ Lifetime Membership, capped at 10,000 buyers, with no renewals. The announcement described the company’s first 10 years as “a decade of fighting the Left at every turn”. Buyers receive a Forward Flag Pin “accented in 14k gold and reserved only for our DW lifers” and a signed copy of Shapiro’s book Lions & Scavengers.

Bauer said asking audiences to pay years of fees up front might reflect anxiety about whether they would keep renewing each year, but could also simply be about building a more stable revenue stream. He compared it with public radio’s open-ended sustaining memberships and said the Daily Wire version “seems more about stabilizing the budget than anything else.”

The company has also cut staff. On 1 May 2026 it confirmed layoffs across several teams, largely concentrated at its Nashville production office, TheWrap reported. Owens wrote on X, the social media platform, that she had heard more than 50 per cent of staff were cut. Brent Scher, the Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief, wrote on X that it was “nowhere near 50% of the company”.

In July the company said it was selling Jeremy’s Razors and Jeremy’s Chocolates to Boreing’s new company, Boreing Media, for an undisclosed sum, Semafor reported. The razor brand had at one point made up 10 per cent of the Daily Wire’s annual revenue, the company said.

The Highmount memo says the company plans to raise its editorial budget to $6.4mn a year from $2.4mn and its editorial headcount to 67 from 22. The documents say the company’s bankers believe a $2bn initial public offering could be achievable “within approximately 18 months.”

Sources

• Daily Wire, under pressure, seeks strategic investors, targets IPO. Semafor, 23 Jun 2026
• A Decade Down, Forever To Go: Introducing DailyWire+ Lifetime Membership. The Daily Wire, 29 Oct 2025
• Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire Hit With Layoffs Across a 'Number of Teams,' Largely From Nashville HQ. TheWrap, 1 May 2026
• One reason for The Daily Wire's decline? Burning too much money on a right-wing "Game of Thrones". Nieman Lab (quoting Puck), 11 May 2026
• The Daily Wire sells Jeremy's Razors to media company's former CEO. Semafor, 8 Jul 2026
• The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing. The New York Times, 31 Jul 2026

The post The Daily Wire lost a third of its paying subscribers in 2025 after spending $50 million on a fantasy series appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Those readers had paid for a paper that told them, in its own slogan, that “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Many of them treated the decision to sit out the presidential race as a betrayal of what they had bought, judging by the cancellations that followed.

The open question is what they were rejecting: neutrality itself, or an owner they saw as bending toward Donald Trump.

The Los Angeles Times offers one comparison. Its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also blocked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris that month. The Times reported that an estimated 20,000 subscribers dropped the paper afterwards. Nieman Lab put its paid base at about 650,000. The gap between the two papers is wide, but the numbers alone do not explain it.

“It’s not often that a publication loses subscribers on this scale,” Damian Radcliffe, Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism and Professor of Practice at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, said in an email. “For any publication, this would represent a huge hit, especially at a time when media companies are leaning more into generating income directly from their audiences, as they reduce their dependency on (declining) advertising revenues.”

“What’s notable here is that these cancellations were driven by editorial decisions rather than price or product changes,” he said.

A newspaper endorsement is a recommendation of a candidate written by the editorial board, the opinion side of the paper. It is separate from the newsroom, which reports the news and does not take a side.

The Post’s board had drafted an endorsement of Harris. On 25 October 2024, publisher Will Lewis said the paper would not endorse in that year’s presidential race or in future ones. It was the first time in 36 years the paper had stayed out of a presidential race. The owner, Jeff Bezos, made the decision.

The decision covered the presidency only. The Post said it would keep endorsing in other races, including local contests, and its board had already backed candidates for the Senate and House in 2024.

Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has owned the Post since 2013. Amazon and his space company, Blue Origin, hold federal contracts worth billions of dollars a year. In February 2017, during Trump’s first term, the paper adopted “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its first official motto. Semafor reported in February 2026 that new marketing campaigns were not meant to replace it.

Within three days of the announcement, more than 200,000 readers had cancelled, about 8 per cent of roughly 2.5 million paid subscribers. Two columnists resigned. Editorial page editor David Shipley told staff he had tried to talk Bezos out of it, NPR reported. “I failed,” he said.

Robert Kagan, an editor at large who quit that Friday, said on CNN: “We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we’re afraid of what he will do.” Officials from Blue Origin had met Trump a few hours after the decision became public.

Bezos said he had not known about that meeting. In an opinion piece in the Post, he said ending presidential endorsements would help counter a “perception of bias”. “No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” he wrote. He added: “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”

The cancellation figures do not come from the Post. The company does not publish circulation numbers and declined to comment on NPR’s reporting. The totals come from people inside the paper who spoke on condition of anonymity.

By January 2025, NPR put the total at more than 300,000. A Post spokesperson said the paper had persuaded about 20 per cent of those cancelling over the endorsement to stay. The paper had been on track to cut its annual loss to about $50 million. NPR reported that figure went back up to about $100 million.

Matthew Pressman, associate professor in the College of Communication, Media and the Arts at Seton Hall University, said in an email that he knew of no newspaper that had lost so many subscribers over a change in its opinion pages.

“I think the Washington Post set the record with Bezos’s moves in 2024,” he said. “Other newspapers have had radical shifts in opinion-page ideology. For example, the New York Daily News, which I just published a book about, transformed almost overnight from strongly pro-FDR to fiercely anti-FDR at the end of 1940. But in that case they didn’t see any major drop in circulation.” FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945.

Pressman said the episode showed that many people pick which outlets to follow, and in particular which to pay for, according to whether those outlets match their politics. “This should be sort of obvious, and it isn’t a new development. It’s especially true for a general-interest, national publication like the Post.”

The owner’s conduct after the election gave critics more to point to. Amazon gave $1 million toward Trump’s inauguration fund, NPR reported, and Bezos sat on the platform at the swearing-in in January 2025.

The following month, Bezos told staff the opinion section would now argue for “personal liberties and free markets”. He wrote that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”. Shipley, the opinions editor, resigned immediately. Former executive editor Marty Baron called the move “craven”. More than 75,000 digital subscribers cancelled in the days after the memo, according to NPR.

The Post worked to replace the lost readers. A Post executive told NPR the paper had added about 400,000 subscribers, many at heavy discounts. NPR’s figures pointed to a net loss of “a couple hundred thousand”.

Radcliffe said discounts do not necessarily close that gap. “It’s important to get customers in through the front door, and discounts are a great way to do that. The challenge is to then keep these subscribers when that discount period ends.”

“Replacing loyal, full-price, customers with heavily discounted subscribers may boost the headline numbers, but it doesn’t necessarily restore lost revenue or long-term subscription numbers,” he said.

In February 2026 the Post cut about a third of its workforce. It scrapped the sports desk, closed its book section and cut the local news staff from more than 40 to about a dozen. Much of the foreign staff was laid off, including the entire Middle East desk. Lewis left, and chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio became interim chief executive. The paper’s losses had reached $100 million a year at their peak, NPR reported. NPR has reported the losses but has not tied the layoffs to the cancellations.

TheWrap, citing the New York Times, said more than 60,000 more subscribers left after the layoffs. A Post spokesperson disputed that number without giving another.

Radcliffe said the real test for the discounted subscribers comes when their introductory price ends. “How long do they stay? Do they leave when the price increases, or a few months later? Do they renew at full price, or another heavily discounted subscription?”

He said the larger question was whether the Post could do anything to win back the readers who left, or whether they, along with their trust in the paper, were gone for good.

Sources:

• Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement, NPR, 28 Oct 2024
• Will Lewis’ first year at ‘Washington Post’: Cancellations, red ink and an exodus, NPR, 15 Jan 2025
• Bezos’ changes at Washington Post lead to mass subscription cancellations again, NPR via WVIK, 28 Feb 2025
• ‘The Washington Post’ cuts a third of its staff, NPR, 4 Feb 2026
• The Washington Post Lost Over 60,000 Subscribers Following Winter Layoffs, TheWrap, 14 Mar 2026
• The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president, The Washington Post, 25 Oct 2024
• Washington Post plans to endorse in local races, Montgomery Perspective, 26 Nov 2024
• Patrick Soon-Shiong’s controversial shakeup at the L.A. Times, Los Angeles Times, 15 Dec 2024
• The L.A. Times sees subscriber bump during wildfire coverage despite removing paywall, Nieman Lab, 13 Jan 2025
• Democracy Dies in Darkness, Wikipedia, accessed Oct 2026
• Washington Post suffers marketing mishap with new slogan, Semafor, 8 Feb 2026

The post NPR says more than 300,000 Washington Post subscribers cancelled after Bezos blocked a presidential endorsement appeared first on The Blog Herald.

So I’ve stopped arguing and started asking: what do you mean by science?

Then I give them mine. Science is asking a question in a way that lets the answer prove you wrong: you measure carefully, you show how you did it, and someone else can check. And yes, in those moments I defend psychology harder than I’d like to admit.

When Hillary Clinton went after the Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in The Atlantic on 29 January 2026, I had a fair idea of what would come next. The next day Stuckey replied on X: “Thank you for the lengthy shoutout! I’ve got a response headed your way.”

The title says this was exactly what her audience needed. That’s my argument. Nobody has surveyed her listeners. But Stuckey’s own words, what the people around her did next and a few public numbers make the case better than I could.

Three paragraphs and a “commissar”

Clinton’s essay, “MAGA’s War on Empathy”, is long, and most of it is about Donald Trump and his movement. Stuckey is one of several people she names. But she gets more than a passing mention.

Clinton calls her “the right-wing Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey” and quotes her X post calling a sermon by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde “toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.” Clinton’s answer: “Toxic empathy! What an oxymoron. I don’t know if the phrase reflects moral blindness or moral bankruptcy, but either way it’s appalling.”

A paragraph later she calls Stuckey a “commissar of MAGA morality” who “targets other evangelicals whose empathy, she warns, has left them open to manipulation.” Further down: “Influencers like Stuckey are zealously policing any deviation from the party line.”

Here’s a detail I didn’t see in the coverage. Stuckey’s written reply in The Free Press opens: “She just accused me of thinking empathy is a sin. That’s not my argument.” But the essay’s sentence about sin doesn’t name her. It reads: “We already have Christian influencers saying empathy is a sin.” The book with that idea in its title belongs to the pastor Joe Rigney, whose Leadership and the Sin of Empathy Clinton names separately. Stuckey may well be right that her argument is different. She’s also answering a line that wasn’t about her alone.

And Clinton writes that empathy “does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity.” Stuckey’s worry, as she put it on her show, is the moment when “You are so deeply in one person’s feelings that you no longer can think objectively.” On paper, they’re closer than either side made it sound. That didn’t stop anyone.

“It is not actually about me”

On 31 January Stuckey answered on her show, Relatable, in a 29-minute episode called “Hillary Clinton Wrote a Hit Piece on Me. My Response.” BlazeTV, which carries the show, wrote it up with her quotes. The first thing she did was hand the attack to her listeners.

“This article might mention me by name, but it is not actually about me,” she said, “because the truth is, if it weren’t for all of you, Hillary Clinton would not care about me.”

Then came the reading of it: “we are over the target.” And: “They don’t trot out former Secretary of State, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, unless they are really worried.” About her own book, Toxic Empathy, she said Clinton had “put more eyes on” it. Honest, at least.

The episode’s description on YouTube does the same work in writing. It promises her answer to “the lies portrayed of her in this article” and asks: “Why is she attacking Allie and others right now? Democrats are trying to sway the Christian vote.” She closed with Luke 6:22: “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and when they revile you and spurn your name as evil”.

Allie Beth Stuckey’s reply to Clinton on Relatable, premiered 31 January 2026 by Allie Beth Stuckey and BlazeTV. It had about 272,000 views by mid-October.

Everyone she named seemed pleased

Stuckey wasn’t the only one. According to The Christian Post, Rigney, whom Clinton calls “the extremist pastor Joe Rigney”, urged his publisher “to reprint the cover of Leadership and the Sin of Empathy with [Clinton’s] enthusiastic endorsement.” Douglas Wilson, “the influential Christian nationalist” in Clinton’s words, joked about it too.

The wider Christian media picked it up within days. Albert Mohler told listeners of The Briefing on 3 February that “Empathy is not a thing,” ChurchLeaders reported. Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen framed it as “A War of Worldviews”. And CBS News’s Major Garrett sat down with Stuckey for an extended interview. That’s a former secretary of state and a national TV network in one week.

I don’t think anybody can buy that kind of promotion.

Why criticism from outside bounces off

In 2004 the social psychologist Matthew Hornsey and his co-author Armin Imani published studies in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on what they call the intergroup sensitivity effect. People see the same criticism of their group, made either by a member or by an outsider. In one study, Australians read negative comments about Australians. When an Australian made them, only five percent strongly disagreed. When an English critic made the identical comments, half did, the University of Queensland reported. A foreigner who had lived and worked in Australia for years met just as much defensiveness.

I recognised myself in that study straight away. I criticise Georgia often, to locals and foreigners alike. There’s a lot my country deserves a critique for, objectively. But when someone who doesn’t have the full context does it, it sounds like a personal attack. Even when I know they have a point, it feels wrong, and I can’t do anything about it.

“according to my research we are super-quick to reject criticism from outsiders, even where they have a legitimate basis.” Matthew Hornsey, University of Queensland News, 2004

It holds in politics too. In 2020, Levi Adelman and Maykel Verkuyten ran three experiments with Dutch adults on a heated topic: how the Netherlands receives refugees. In all three, people agreed more with a critic from inside their group than from outside. In the two studies that asked, they also rated the insider as more constructive and more expert.

That’s the part that makes me a little uncomfortable. The effect doesn’t check who is right. Clinton could be entirely right about Stuckey, or entirely wrong, and the research suggests her words would land the same way with Stuckey’s listeners: as an outsider’s, from about as far outside as it gets. It works on Atlantic readers too, when the critic is someone like Stuckey.

Who the enemy has to be

There’s also a longer story about why this works so well with evangelical audiences. In 1998 the sociologist Christian Smith argued, in American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, that American evangelicalism is strong because it sees itself as embattled. It “thrives on distinction, engagement, conflict, and threat,” as Lauren Winner quoted his argument in her review. His evidence included 130 two-hour interviews and 2,591 phone surveys.

I asked Smith, now an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, whether that still holds nearly 30 years on. “I believe American evangelicalism operates with the same dynamics as I described in my 1998 book,” he told me. Perceived attacks from liberals and secularists, he said, “would be viewed as a threat that would continue their sense of need for defensive attention and mobilization.” He sees what has lately been called Christian nationalism in the US as “an extreme expression of that.”

The sense of being under pressure has grown since. In 2009, 42 percent of white evangelicals said evangelical Christians face a lot of discrimination. By 2023 it was 60 percent, according to Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life. Cox doesn’t write it off as a persecution complex. He points to how fast American culture moved on sexuality, and to politicians who amplify the fear.

Put Smith and Cox next to Stuckey’s episode and the business logic is plain. A show like hers needs an outside world that disapproves of its listeners. A former secretary of state calling its host a “commissar” in The Atlantic is that world in its clearest form. Clinton walked straight into the role Stuckey’s audience already expects someone to play.

Did the attack actually help her?

Nobody has surveyed her listeners, but a few public numbers point the same way. On her YouTube channel, the Clinton episode has about 272,000 views. The eight episodes around it, four before and four after, have between 63,000 and 70,000 each. That’s roughly four times her usual audience for one episode.

On X, Clinton’s post sharing the essay had 2.8 million views and 4,800 likes by mid-October. Stuckey’s reply had 322,000 views, about a ninth as many, and 4,500 likes. Almost as many people liked her answer as liked the essay announcement itself.

Google searches tell a quieter story. In the week after the essay, US searches for Stuckey’s name ran about 75 percent above the two weeks before, according to Google Trends. Then they fell back. Her October 2025 debate with 20 progressive Christians on the YouTube channel Jubilee drew about three times as much search interest. So my reading is this: the attack didn’t bring many new people to her. It lit up the ones already there.

Now the limits, because there are real ones. Views and likes measure attention, and Google Trends gives relative interest from a sample of searches. Neither can tell you what anyone believes. And the one experiment I found on this kind of message gives a mixed answer. In a 2021 study, the independent researcher Luke Herrington had 816 American adults read either an article framing Christians as persecuted or an unrelated one about Mars. Across everyone, their sense that religious liberty was under threat barely moved, and the differences weren’t statistically significant. But conservatives who read the persecution story were especially likely to feel that threat, he reports. It was one online study with paid survey-takers, so I’d hold it loosely. Still, it fits what the numbers above suggest. An attack like Clinton’s may not change anyone’s mind. It may just bind the people already listening a little tighter.

Next time someone tells me psychology isn’t a science, I’ll still ask for their definition. I’ll just keep in mind that, to them, I’m the outsider.

The post Hillary Clinton attacked Allie Beth Stuckey in The Atlantic, which is exactly what Stuckey’s audience needed appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Five years later, The Bulwark is a profitable business. Rob Walker’s profile in Inc. says revenue topped $20 million in 2025 and is heading for about $30 million this year, while the Wall Street Journal counted more than 140,000 paid subscribers across Substack and YouTube in June. Not bad for an outfit that started as an aggregator, rounding up other people’s links.

But Trump’s second term ends in January 2029, and the Washingtonian’s question is slowly coming back round. Is The Bulwark a club people will keep paying for, or a ringside seat they’ll give up once the fight’s over?

I went through the company’s published numbers to find out. They show how fast The Bulwark is growing, but not whether members stay, a difference worth understanding if you sell memberships.

From a list of links to a paid club

The Bulwark started life in late 2018 as a news aggregator, Sarah Longwell has told members. For a couple of years, it ran as an ad-free nonprofit on donations. As Semafor’s Max Tani tells it, fans kept trying to send the site money, so the founders set up paid subscriptions on Substack, with extra content as thanks. Bulwark+ launched in September 2020, seven weeks before that year’s election, and the company has since gone for-profit.

Tani also called The Bulwark a “media escort” for former Republicans on their way to backing Democrats. It’s the best short description of the business I’ve seen, and it points at the risk. If The Bulwark’s job is helping people move from one political home to another, some of them may stop needing it once they’ve made the transition.

I was never on that journey. In 2024, YouTube kept recommending me videos of Tim Miller, who hosts The Bulwark Podcast. I watched him appear on Piers Morgan’s show and found him charismatic and remarkably sensible. I was surprised and fascinated to learn he was a former Republican, and not a casual one: he’d worked on Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign before breaking with his party over Trump. Yet his views were the same as, or close to, those of the progressives I’ve known all my life.

American politics is famously polarized, all black and white, and in my experience few people sit in the gray. Miller is one of the exceptions. I subscribed to The Bulwark’s YouTube channel and still watch now and then. But I’ve never paid. Then again, I was never a Republican, so maybe I wasn’t quite the audience The Bulwark originally had in mind.

What the numbers actually say

How much of The Bulwark’s money comes from members? I tried to work it out and couldn’t. The published figures measure different things and can’t be added up. That’s normal for a private company. It’s still somewhat maddening.

Some count paying members: about 16,000 in March 2021 and 76,000 Substack subscribers in February 2025, per New York magazine. The Journal’s 140,000 also includes people paying through YouTube, so it isn’t like-for-like.

Some are run-rates, which take what’s coming in at one moment and multiply it out to a full year. Longwell told Semafor in September 2024 that subscriptions were on track for more than $5 million a year, though the report doesn’t say whether that was Substack alone. In November 2025, she told Peter Kafka on his Channels podcast that Substack subscriptions alone were on pace for more than $12 million. The $30 million for this year is a forecast.

The missing years

After the 16,000 of March 2021, the next membership figure I found was in The Bulwark’s mission statement from August 2023, which says tens of thousands of people had joined Bulwark+. For 2021 and 2022, the two years after Trump left office, I couldn’t find any comparable figure. So there’s no telling whether people piled in while Trump was off the scene or mostly arrived with the 2024 campaign.

Between September 2024 and November 2025, Longwell’s subscription run-rates went from more than $5 million a year to more than $12 million, though the two aren’t quite like-for-like. Critics say Trump is the whole story. Ryan Zickgraf argued in UnHerd that Trump has given centrism “drama, a villain, a sense of apocalypse”. Timing is everything in business, and The Bulwark capitalized: it spent those months hiring reporters and pushing hard into video. There’s no telling how much of the growth came from Trump’s return and how much from the spending, but my bet is it took both. Trump brought the attention, and The Bulwark was ready to catch it.

The renewal question

A subscriber total is a net figure: everyone who joined, minus everyone who canceled. A membership can keep growing while people quietly leave, as long as new ones arrive faster. The number that would show whether members stay is the renewal rate, the share of members who pay again when their subscription comes up. Plenty of numbers get announced; this one, as far as I can find, hasn’t been.

Longwell likes to talk about the live shows. In a post celebrating the Journal’s profile, she quoted its finding that they sometimes sell out within hours and need second nights. A sold-out theater proves people want to see the hosts. It says nothing about whether the people in seats 14B and 14C would bother with each other if the hosts didn’t show up.

The fan forums

From outside the paywall, the best evidence of fans caring about each other is two fan-built forums, both still going. In April, Miller read the subreddit’s meanest posts about him on a members’ livestream, which tells you the forum is lively and Miller is thick-skinned. The Discord looks to be The Bulwark (Unofficial), created in December 2020, before the Washingtonian piece. When I checked on 11 October, it had 1,805 members, 96 of them online.

Neither forum says much about paying members. The Bulwark runs its own members’ community inside Substack, with subscriber chats and comment sections, and that 2023 mission statement credits members with creating “the kind of community that’s not supposed to be possible on the internet”. It’s a lovely line that outsiders can’t check, since that community sits behind a paywall.

The real test is likely to come after Trump’s term ends in January 2029. First, do paying members keep renewing? That would prove loyalty to The Bulwark, though not to each other; people renew gym memberships for years without learning anyone’s name. Second, do members and fans keep talking to each other if Trump becomes less of a draw, in the comments and on that Discord? If both hold, it’s a genuine community.

If people keep paying but the conversation dries up, The Bulwark still has a loyal audience, and maybe more community behind its paywall than I can see. My guess is a big loyal audience with a smaller community inside it. If I were Longwell, I’d publish the renewal rate. If it’s good, it wouldn’t prove The Bulwark is a community, but it would answer a lot of the doubts in this piece. If it’s bad, the totals can still look healthy for as long as new members arrive faster than old ones leave.

The post The Bulwark turned Republican exile into a $20 million media business. Now it has to prove its community can outlast Trump appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The same split shows up for the news in general. Every year the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford surveys people across dozens of countries for its Digital News Report. This year’s edition, out in June, covered 48 countries with around 2,000 people in each. Among its questions is one simple statement: “I think you can trust most news most of the time.” It’s the sort of thing you answer from the gut. Only a quarter of Americans agreed, and I can’t say I’m surprised.

In Finland, nearly two-thirds agreed, and in Kenya and Nigeria more than two-thirds did. That makes Americans less than half as likely as Finns, Kenyans or Nigerians to say they trust most of the news, though the Kenyans and Nigerians who took part are a much narrower slice of their countries.

America’s 25% is also a record low, the lowest since the Institute started asking in 2015, and five points down on last year.

How the survey measures trust

YouGov, the polling firm, ran the survey online from mid-January to the end of February, with targets for age, gender and region in every country. In the United States and a dozen other countries, it also balanced people by how they voted at the last election.

The Institute is careful with small changes. A move of a point or two could easily be noise, so it doesn’t treat those as real changes. America’s five-point fall is well clear of that line, and it wasn’t alone. Trust dropped in more than half the countries surveyed, pushing the global average to its lowest level since 2015.

The survey also asks about specific outlets. People score the brands they know from 0 to 10, and a 6 or higher counts as trust. That’s how a single outlet can land well above the 25% headline figure. In the report’s US chapter, Lucas Graves and Joy Jenkins note that Fox News and CBS News each dropped 10 points this year. Of the brands tested, the ones Americans trusted most were the closest to home, their local TV news and local paper, each trusted by more than half the people who rated them.

Who is answering in Kenya and Nigeria

Are Kenyans and Nigerians just more trusting people? The survey has no way of knowing, and the Reuters Institute is the first to admit it.

According to the Institute’s methodology notes, the survey in both countries was done mostly in English, and only people aged 18 to 50 took part. That gives you a younger, English-speaking crowd, which is a long way from a cross-section of either country. The Institute puts it plainly: “Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.”

The Kenya and Nigeria pages add that the people who answered tend to be better off, better educated and more likely to live in cities than most of their fellow citizens. The American group is a closer match, built to reflect US adults by age, gender, region, education and how they voted. Still, no country’s sample is picked at random, so none is a perfect mirror of its population.

These same respondents are the most worried about fake news anywhere in the survey. Plenty of them also get news through WhatsApp, about six in ten in Kenya and nearly seven in ten in Nigeria. Catherine Gicheru and George Nyabuga, who wrote the Kenya chapter, say audiences there tell outlets apart and save their trust for familiar names. Almost every Kenyan brand tested scores above 80%, and Nigerian brands sit in a similar range. Tolulope Adeyemo’s Nigeria chapter notes that the media there work under political pressure and financial strain.

Kenya’s score has also jumped 18 points since 2020.

Finland is slipping as well

Yle, Finland’s public broadcaster, has spent the past year eliminating 309 positions, about a tenth of its workforce, under spending cuts imposed in 2024.

The report doesn’t connect those cuts to audience attitudes, but Finnish trust in news did fall four points this year to 63%, after holding at 69% from 2022 to 2024. Ville Manninen and Mikko Villi of the University of Jyväskylä, who penned the Finland chapter, describe it as “a return to a global, downward trend” after a boost that ran from 2021 to 2024. They also stress that Finns remain among the most trusting audiences the report measures.

I lined up the yearly figures from the report’s chart data for the US and Finland. Since 2024, Finland has dropped six points and the United States seven, so the gap between them has moved from 37 points to 38. That’s a one-point change, too small to interpret as a meaningful widening. The gap was actually wider in 2022, at 43 points, when American trust sat at 26%.

On these figures, the two countries have seen similar declines since 2024.

The distance to Kenya and Nigeria has grown much faster, from around 30 points in 2024 to 43 this year, though that comparison carries every caveat above.

Add the UK and the Philippines, and the US still comes last of the six in each of the last five editions. The Philippines had the sharpest fall in this year’s survey, down 10 points.

What changed in America this year

“Threats to press freedom in the United States have sharpened in 2026,” say Graves and Jenkins at the top of the US chapter. They describe President Donald Trump threatening to prosecute reporters for treason and taking legal aim at the BBC and The New York Times. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that a third of the newsroom would go, and Congress approved the loss of around $500m a year in federal funding for public media.

“We can probably expect trust in news overall to fall further in future,” writes Jim Egan, the report’s lead author. He links the slide to falling trust in institutions, politicians attacking journalism and a drift towards social media and video, which people have long trusted less than traditional outlets.

The survey can’t say which of these events moved the American number, and it doesn’t claim to. Its fieldwork wrapped up in February, so anything later, including the treason threats, can’t have played a part. Even for earlier events, a single agree-or-disagree statement is a crude tool for pinning a national mood on any one headline.

My mom and stepdad live in Arizona and, like a lot of Americans I know, they’ve grown disillusioned with the mainstream media. As they see it, the big networks answer to corporate interests before anything else, so they now get much of their news from independent sources on Facebook. Fox News is the one big network that still makes the cut. Like many Americans, they lean on Facebook too. It’s the most-used social network for news in the American survey, with 36% of respondents using it that way each week.

They’re also Trump supporters (at least they were, the last time I checked), and I suspect years of hearing him call so much of the press “fake news” have done some of the persuading. In a 2019 white paper, Michael Cornfield of George Washington University counted 291 tweets in which Trump used “Fake News” or “Fake News Media” during his first 19 months in office, about 7% of everything he posted on his main account. Fox News was the exception, the same one my parents make. It may not be a coincidence.

Experiments back that up, to a point. Emily Van Duyn and Jessica Collier at the University of Texas at Austin found in 2019 that people shown tweets about fake news from high-profile figures reported lower trust in the media and got worse at recognising real news. Their follow-up found the phrase “fake news” hurt perceptions of news and journalists more than “misinformation” did, particularly when coming from a politician. Experiments like these capture short-term reactions, so they say little about what long-term repetition does.

I also suspect social media is pulling Americans apart and dragging their faith in institutions down with it. The research is messier than that, though. In a large field experiment published in Nature, a team including Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan cut content from like-minded sources in 23,377 Facebook users’ feeds by about a third during the 2020 election. Over the following three months, they found no measurable effect on polarisation. They added the caveat that their experiment can’t fully capture what earlier Facebook use may already have done, so ultimately, the question stays open.

Other polls give different numbers

I wanted to see whether others agree with the Reuters Institute that only a quarter of Americans trust most news. Two long-running American pollsters, Gallup and Pew Research Center, both put the figure higher.

Gallup’s latest poll, written up by Lydia Saad, rang Americans this September and asked how much they trust newspapers, TV and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” A third said a great deal or a fair amount, up from a record low of 28% last year. Almost all of that rise came from Republicans, whose trust climbed from 8% to 22%, while Democrats held roughly steady at 50%, the lowest Gallup has recorded for them. The calls ended just before the White House barred several national outlets, so that episode isn’t reflected. I do wonder whether my mother and stepdad are part of that Republican bounce.

Pew Research Center‘s version of the question, from September 2025, asked whether people had at least some trust in information from news organisations. Kirsten Eddy and Elisa Shearer found 56% did for national outlets and 70% for local ones, both down about ten points in six months.

So, depending on who’s asking, roughly a quarter, a third or more than half of Americans trust the news. I find that spread oddly comforting, because so much depends on how you ask. The polls differ in wording, the kind of trust they ask about, who they sample, how they reach people and when they ran. Without a proper side-by-side test, nobody can say which difference matters most. Wording is the easiest to spot: saying you trust most news most of the time is a big commitment, and admitting to some trust is a much smaller one. The long-run direction is clearer, though. In the 1970s Gallup found around 70% of Americans trusted the media, and the Reuters figure has slipped from 32% in 2015.

What I can’t tell you is whether Kenyans and Nigerians as a whole trust the news more than Americans, whether the gap with Finland is growing, or which events did the damage. These surveys just don’t stretch that far.

The local TV score is the one that sticks with me.

Some 56% of Americans who rated their local TV news said they trust it, more than for any national brand tested. Maybe it’s simply easier to trust the people covering your own streets, like the weather presenter whose forecast you can check by looking out the window. If trust really does erode the further a newsroom sits from home, I’d like to know what local stations are getting right, and whether any of them have made it into my parents’ Facebook feeds.

The post Only one in four Americans now trust the news, a record low that leaves them at less than half the levels reported in Finland, Kenya and Nigeria appeared first on The Blog Herald.

First, though, the number everyone quoted this summer. In August, TechCrunch reported Similarweb data showing that Bluesky’s app averaged about 22.1 million monthly active users at the end of 2024, and 10.7 million in April to June 2026. That’s a drop of around 52%. Half, give or take.

Half of what, exactly?

I always want to know what a number is counting before I believe it. This one counts the mobile app only. In the same report, X and Threads also got website figures. Bluesky didn’t. And Bluesky itself doesn’t publish how many people actually use it. It shows the number of registered accounts, which TechCrunch put at nearly 46 million.

So I’d read “half” as half of the app’s regular users, by one company’s estimate. Still a lot.

There’s one more detail that most headlines skipped. The people who stayed are fairly active. Similarweb puts the share of monthly users who open the app on any given day at about 29%, roughly the same as Threads. So the room is smaller, but people are still in it.

Who moved in after November 2024?

The big wave came after the 2024 US election. Pew Research Center has been tracking 500 news influencers, people with at least 100,000 followers who post about current events. Before Election Day, 21% of them had a Bluesky account. By March 2025, 43% did.

Who they were matters more than how many. Among influencers who leaned left, 69% had joined Bluesky. Among those who leaned right, 15% had.

But most of them didn’t actually leave X. Three-quarters of the left-leaning influencers still had an X account, and 83% of influencers on X posted there four or more days a week. On Bluesky, almost half (48%) didn’t post regularly at all. Many moved in, it seems, but kept the keys to the old flat.

The lean wasn’t new, either. An earlier study by Dorian Quelle and Alexandre Bovet at the University of Zurich, covering about five million users from 2023 to May 2024, found that most shared news came from left-of-centre outlets.

What happens when the other side is 1% of the room?

The study that made me stop and reread was done by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Zurich. They collected all activity on Bluesky from December 2024 to May 2025: 13.5 million new profiles and more than a billion posts. About 13% of posts were about politics.

Then they looked at the most divided topics, the ones where people split into two camps. On those, the smaller camp was “only 1–2% of the users,” in the words of their summary. In the body of the paper it’s “1% or less” in every case. Their conclusion: Bluesky has “a more politically homogeneous user base than was typical prior to the current wave of platform fragmentation.”

In most studies I know, a 1% group would be a footnote. Here it’s the entire opposition. Two caveats, from the authors themselves: an AI model sorted the posts into sides, with only spot checks by people, and they looked at English-language posts. It’s also a preprint, so it hasn’t been through peer review yet.

And when the other side did show up, it didn’t get a debate. In October 2025 the White House joined Bluesky with a sarcastic “What’s up, Bluesky?” video. Within two days it was the second most-blocked account on the platform, behind only Vice President JD Vance, Gizmodo reported, using data from the block tracker Clearsky. People didn’t argue. They blocked.

Do we need someone to argue with?

There’s a good reason to think a fight keeps a feed alive. In a 2021 study in PNAS, Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden looked at 2.7 million posts from news outlets and members of the US Congress on Facebook and Twitter. Each word about the other political side raised the odds of a post being shared by 67%. That was about 4.8 times the effect of negative words, and 6.7 times the effect of moral-emotional ones. Posts about the other side also drew more “angry” reactions.

Take the other side away, and you take away a lot of that fuel. Mark Cuban, one of Bluesky’s best-known users, said much the same on the platform in June 2025, sharing a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side.”

The lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202… Opinion | Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side – The Washington Post

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) 2025-06-08T19:53:37.519Z

Less than an hour later, he added this:

The moderation and block tools on here are so advanced , if you see someone you don’t want to see on here, just block them. Don’t attack them. There used to be great give and take discussions on politics and news. Not so much any more. Doesn’t have to be this way

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) 2025-06-08T20:35:48.043Z

Not everyone thinks that’s a problem. Mike Masnick, who founded Techdirt and sits on Bluesky’s board (he says so at the top of his piece), answered the critics with a knitting circle: you don’t join one and complain that everyone wants to talk about knitting. “Most people aren’t looking for a debating arena,” he wrote. The political scientist Daniel Drezner had made a similar point before the big wave, admitting in a 2024 post that Bluesky was “definitely more homogenous than, say, the Twitter of a decade ago.” He stayed anyway, because his “utility from Bluesky comes from who else is there.”

“As a result, the clash of conflicting views is diminishing, not because the surrounding polarization has decreased, but because individuals with differing political attitudes are increasingly segregated into separate, self-reinforcing digital environments.” — Salloum et al., “Politics and polarization on Bluesky” (2025)

Rathje’s own newer work adds a twist. In a preprint available on OSF, he and colleagues paid Twitter users to unfollow hyperpartisan accounts. Compared with a control group, their feelings towards the other party improved by 23.5%, the effect lasted at least six months, and they ended up more satisfied with Twitter.

So a calmer feed can be a nicer one. Whether it’s a feed people keep opening every day is a different question, and that’s the one Bluesky is answering in real time.

I should be clear about what nobody has shown. No study links Bluesky’s one-sidedness to its drop in users. The network study ended in May 2025, before most of the decline. Similarweb’s data doesn’t show people going back to X either: X’s app lost users too, with daily users down 7% to 123.7 million in July, while Threads’ daily users grew 21.3% to 147 million. And Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, is betting less on the app and more on the protocol underneath it, which other apps now use. So the bubble is the explanation I find most convincing. It just isn’t proven.

I’m still outside both rooms. From out here, one of them sounds loud and angry, and the other sounds calm and half-empty. I can’t tell you which one people miss more. I’m not sure they can either.

The post Bluesky lost half its active users, which is what can happen to a bubble with nobody to fight appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Get the choice wrong and the cost isn’t just a clunky dashboard. It’s an audience built on infrastructure that quietly works against the thing the creator actually wants, which is readers who eventually pay.

Migrating a list of any real size later, once a creator has actually noticed the platform isn’t converting the way they hoped, is its own slow, imperfect process, so the decision carries more weight up front than most people give it credit for.

What beehiiv actually publishes

In June 2026, beehiiv released its own State of Paid Newsletters report, built from first-party data across the thousands of paid publications running on its platform.

The headline number is blunt: the median newsletter on beehiiv converts 0.62 percent of free subscribers into paying ones. The spread above that median is enormous. Top-decile publications in categories like investing and economy pull conversion rates as high as 18 to 30 percent, while most niches sit closer to that sub-one-percent median.

beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk framed the broader growth trend behind those numbers this way: “Richer tools plus a more mature user base drove the explosion in subscription revenue growth.” beehiiv’s chief customer officer, Preeya Goenka, put a finer point on what actually moves a publication off that low median: “Paid isn’t just a paywall, it’s a product launch with value prop, pricing, offers, automations, nurture sequences.”

What Substack doesn’t

Substack, by contrast, has crossed five million paid subscriptions across its platform as of 2026, a figure the company has shared publicly.

What it hasn’t shared, in any report or disclosure available in 2026, is a comparable conversion rate: what share of the free readers on a typical Substack actually become paying ones. The handful of specific percentages floating around the internet attributed to Substack trace back to aggregator sites and unsourced “statistics” roundups, not to anything Substack itself has published or that a credible third party has independently verified.

That’s worth sitting with rather than glossing over. A creator comparing these two platforms in 2026 isn’t actually looking at two comparable numbers. They’re looking at one platform that has chosen, for whatever mix of confidence and marketing reasons, to publish granular conversion data down to the industry vertical, and one that hasn’t published anything close to it.

Why the asymmetry itself is the real story

It would be more satisfying to hand over two clean percentages and let a reader pick the higher one. But treating beehiiv’s self-reported 0.62 percent median as directly comparable to a Substack number that doesn’t actually exist would be its own kind of misleading, dressing up a one-sided data point as a head-to-head contest.

beehiiv has an obvious interest in telling a strong paid-newsletter growth story, since it competes directly for the same creators Substack already hosts, so even its own number deserves the same scrutiny a creator would apply to any vendor’s benchmark report.

What the two platforms do differ on, in ways that are independently documented rather than self-reported, is how they structure the free-to-paid conversion mechanism itself.

Substack tends to lean on mid-article paywalls that interrupt a piece partway through, which can convert aggressively but also frustrates free readers faster. beehiiv leans more on inline upgrade prompts inside otherwise-free issues, a gentler nudge that trades some immediate conversion pressure for a longer runway with the free list. Neither approach is simply better. They’re different bets on the same tradeoff, and which one fits depends entirely on what a specific newsletter is actually trying to build.

A broader lesson sits underneath these two specific platforms. Any vendor benchmark report, from any company selling a tool, is worth reading the same way: as a genuinely useful data point, and also as a document written by a party with a stake in the story it tells. beehiiv’s numbers are more specific and more useful than anything Substack has put out, which is worth crediting. That doesn’t make them neutral.

Where I’ve landed thinking about this for my own newsletter decisions

Content strategy is most of what I actually do for a living, across several very different properties, and platform choice is exactly the kind of decision that looks like a spreadsheet problem until you notice half the spreadsheet is missing real numbers for one of the two columns.

My honest takeaway isn’t “pick beehiiv because it publishes better data” or “avoid Substack because it doesn’t.” It’s that a platform’s willingness to publish its own weak points, alongside its strong ones, tells a creator something about how that company thinks about the relationship, separate from whichever platform’s mechanics happen to fit a given audience better.

Across the different properties I work on, the honest answer to “which platform converts best” has never been a single number anyway. It’s been a much slower process of watching what a specific audience actually does, then adjusting the offer instead of assuming the platform will do the work alone.

Even beehiiv’s own report closes on advice that has nothing to do with which logo sits on the dashboard, urging creators to test their own approach to pricing and value rather than copying a template. That holds regardless of which platform’s paywall a creator ends up using, and it’s a more honest starting point than chasing a clean percentage that, for at least one of these two platforms, simply isn’t public yet.

The post beehiiv’s 2026 benchmark data shows a median newsletter converts well under one percent of free subscribers into paying ones, while Substack still discloses no comparable conversion figures of its own, a transparency gap that creators researching where to launch a new paid newsletter are only now starting to take seriously appeared first on The Blog Herald.

It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong in a specific, useful way, because it treats every blog as if it’s competing for the same kind of search, when the data shows something much more uneven happening underneath the panic.

The overall picture, before the split

Start with the baseline, because the shift is real even before you get to which categories are hit hardest. Researchers Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, publishing for the Pew Research Center, tracked nearly 69,000 real Google searches from a representative panel of US adults and found that “Google users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits.”

Users who never saw a summary clicked through roughly twice as often, in 15% of visits. That finding comes from a broad, methodologically careful look at ordinary search behavior across a real cross-section of searches, and it confirms the basic mechanism: when Google answers the question itself, fewer people keep going.

What that Pew data doesn’t do, deliberately, is break the result down by topic. It’s an average across every kind of search, which is exactly where the “every blog is doomed” story starts to fall apart, because an average hides enormous variation underneath it.

What actually decides who gets hit

A 2026 keyword study by marketing researchers Trevin Shirey and Macy Storm, who analyzed 2.37 million US search terms, gets at that variation directly. Some categories saw AI Overviews on roughly a third or more of their searches, among them pets and animal content, travel guides, mental health topics, and personal finance. Other categories saw them far less often.

The study’s own explanation for the gap is blunt: “If you rely heavily on informational queries to drive revenue, AI Overviews will hit you harder than an industry that relies more on transactional queries to drive revenue.”

That’s the one thing the split comes down to. The topic itself doesn’t decide it, and neither does how well-written the content is or how much domain authority a site carries in the old SEO sense. What decides it is whether the underlying question is one Google can fully answer on the results page, or one that still requires the reader to go somewhere and do something.

The same study found AI Overviews showing up on “39% of them producing AI Overviews” for informational searches, against 15.8% for transactional ones. A search for what a word means, how a condition is typically treated, or what year something happened is a question with a finished answer. A search meant to end in a booking, a purchase, or a specific account login generally isn’t, no matter how confidently an AI system tries to summarize it.

It’s worth sitting with why that split exists instead of just accepting the numbers. An AI system summarizing a page is essentially doing extraction. It pulls the checkable fact out of the writing and discards the rest, because the rest wasn’t the point of the query.

A reader asking what year a law took effect, or what the typical dosage range for a supplement looks like, wanted the fact, not the writer. A reader asking which specific hiking trail near a specific town is actually worth the drive, or whether a specific product held up after six months of real use, wanted a person who’d actually been there or used the thing. That second kind of question resists extraction because no single correct fact exists to pull out, only someone’s account of it.

The properties I watch don’t all move the same way

I manage content across several publishing sites at once, aimed at different audiences and built around different kinds of questions, and this pattern tracks with what I actually see in the dashboards, even without pretending I have a controlled study of my own.

The pages built around a pure factual question, the kind with one clean, extractable answer, behave differently from the pages built around a specific product, a specific place, or a specific person’s actual experience with something. The first kind is exactly what an AI summary is built to replace. The second kind is harder to compress into three bullet points and a citation, because the value was never really the fact itself. It was the specific voice delivering it.

A fair amount of my actual job is title generation and figuring out how to angle a piece so it earns attention instead of assuming it deserves it, and that work has gotten more interesting rather than less useful since this shift accelerated. A generic, fact-first headline is now competing directly with a machine that can answer the underlying question before a reader ever reaches the page. A headline built around a specific, opinionated angle, one an AI Overview has no equivalent version of because there’s no single fact to extract, is still doing the job a headline is supposed to do.

Where that leaves the rest of us

I don’t think this lets anyone off the hook, and I’m wary of the version of this argument that turns into “just make better content” as if that alone solves a structural shift in how search engines work. But panicking about a single average number, without asking whether your specific blog lives on the informational side of that split or the side that still requires a reader to click through and do something, wastes energy that could go toward an actual decision.

The honest question is whether the specific questions your blog answers are the kind a summary box can finish in two sentences, or the kind that still needs you, rather than whether AI answer boxes are a threat in some general sense.

I keep coming back to something I believe about most hard problems, which is that the mistake is usually treating a big, scary trend as one giant thing instead of breaking it into the specific pieces that actually apply to you. “AI is killing blogs” is the giant, scary version. “My mental-health explainer competes directly with an instant summary, and my review of a specific product doesn’t” is the version you can actually act on.

The post AI answer boxes are reportedly wiping out a majority of organic search traffic for some blog categories in 2026 — while others have barely lost a visitor, and the split comes down to one thing appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The instinct that keeps getting proven wrong is the one that wants to build up to a point slowly, set the scene, earn the payoff. Readers, it turns out, are not reading it that way at all.

The pattern researchers actually found

The original research behind this comes from Nielsen Norman Group, which tracked the eye movements of 232 users across thousands of web pages back in 2006 and kept studying the same behavior for years afterward.

The shape that showed up again and again looks roughly like the letter F: a horizontal sweep across the top of the content, a second, shorter horizontal sweep somewhat further down, and then a vertical drift down the left edge of the page as the reader’s eyes give up on reading in full and start scanning instead.

It isn’t a rigid rule so much as a description of what tired, busy attention does by default, and the group has always been careful to frame it that way rather than as a fixed law.

The exact shape shifts with layout, with how a page uses images or bullet points, and with whether someone’s reading on a phone or a desktop screen. What doesn’t shift much is the underlying habit driving it: most visitors decide fast whether a page deserves closer reading, and they make that call from the top of the content down, not after finishing the piece.

A follow-up piece from the same research group, updated as recently as this year, confirms the pattern held up well past its original discovery: “Our recent eyetracking research shows that the F-shaped scanning pattern is alive and well in today’s world, both on desktop and on mobile.” Nearly two decades and an entirely different generation of screens later, the basic shape of how people scan hasn’t changed as much as most of us assume.

Why this actually matters for anyone writing to be read

The practical consequence is blunt. If most readers only genuinely absorb the first couple of horizontal sweeps before dropping into scan mode, then anything essential that shows up after that point is competing with a reader who has already mentally decided how much attention this page deserves.

Jakob Nielsen’s own guidance on this, based directly on the eye-tracking data, doesn’t leave much room for a slow build: “The first two paragraphs must state the most important information.”

Put the actual point in the first two paragraphs

Not a teaser for the point. Not the color and mood that leads up to the point three sections later. The actual finding, claim, or answer, stated plainly, before the reader has decided whether this piece is worth their full attention.

A slow build might read beautifully to the one person editing it closely, which is exactly the problem, since that person already knows where it’s going.

Make the words that start each line do real work

Since readers scan down the left edge once they’ve stopped reading closely, the words sitting at the start of subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points matter more than the words buried in the middle of a sentence.

Kara Pernice’s more recent research at the same group put it directly: “Include the most important points in the first two paragraphs on the page,” and the same logic extends downward, into every subhead a scanning eye actually lands on.

Stop treating structure as decoration

A subhead that says something vague and clever instead of something specific is invisible to a reader who’s already scanning rather than reading. This is the one that took me longest to actually internalize, because a clever, understated subhead often feels like better writing in isolation. It isn’t better writing if nobody in scan mode understands what the section beneath it is actually about.

Read your own draft the way a scanner would, not the way its writer does

The hardest habit to build is reading a finished draft as if seeing it for the first time, tired, mid-scroll, half paying attention. Cover the piece with one hand, or read only the subheads and first lines of each paragraph in order, and ask whether that skeleton alone actually tells the story. If it doesn’t, the full version probably isn’t landing for the large share of readers who never make it past that skeleton anyway.

Where I’ve had to unlearn my own habits

Titles get almost all the attention in my job, and for good reason, but the body of the piece is where I used to let old habits slide. I’d write a clean, punchy headline and then let the actual article wander for two or three paragraphs before getting to the thing the headline promised, on the theory that a reader who clicked through has already bought in and will wait for the reveal. The eye-tracking data says otherwise. A reader who clicked through is still deciding, in the first few seconds, whether this particular page is going to reward the time they’ve already spent.

None of this means writing gets to be flat or joyless, front-loaded information and a piece with personality aren’t in conflict. It just means the personality has to sit around the point, not stand in front of it for two paragraphs while the reader decides whether to keep going. Nearly twenty years of the same eye-tracking finding is a long time for a piece of research to hold up unchanged, and it’s a strong enough signal that I’d rather build my writing habits around it than around whatever feels more satisfying to draft.

The post Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it appeared first on The Blog Herald.

That distinction matters, because the print era and the digital era genuinely aren’t the same product wearing different clothes. A printed paper arrives on a schedule you don’t control, all at once, in an order an editor chose for you. A digital edition updates through the day, gets read on a phone during a lunch break instead of at a kitchen table, and can be searched instead of flipped through. Both can carry the same reporting. The experience of receiving it is a different thing entirely, and for a long time that difference was exactly why print held on even as its economics stopped making sense.

MLive president John Hiner didn’t frame the decision as a mystery. “What has happened is, logistically, as the population has gotten older, subscribers have died,” he said, describing a subscriber base that was shrinking for the plainest possible reason, not a sudden loss of interest in local news. Delivering a physical paper to fewer and fewer addresses spread across a wide area gets more expensive per subscriber every year, until the math stops working regardless of how good the reporting inside it is.

It’s worth sitting with how long that math has actually been breaking down, rather than treating September’s announcement as sudden. The papers involved here trace back well over a century in some cases, through decades where a subscription was close to a default household expense in the towns they covered, not an optional add-on competing with a dozen streaming services and a news feed that refreshes itself. A gradual shift from “everyone in town gets the paper” to “most people in town read the news on a phone they already had in their pocket” doesn’t announce itself with a single dramatic headline. It shows up as a slowly thinning subscriber list for twenty straight years, until a company finally says out loud what the numbers have been saying quietly the whole time.

The digital side of that same ledger tells the other half of the story. “More than 99% of the company’s readership comes from digital formats,” Hiner said, and digital subscribers now outnumber print subscribers outright. Michigan isn’t unusual here. More than 3,500 newspapers nationwide have stopped printing over the past two decades, according to tracking by the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, and MLive’s eight papers join a list that’s been growing for a generation, not a sudden 2026 trend. Seen against that backdrop, the September announcement reads less like a company giving up on print and more like one finally acknowledging a shift its own numbers had already made.

What’s genuinely different this time is the tone of the announcement. Hiner didn’t pretend the print edition doesn’t carry real weight for the communities it served. “It’s nice to have a name on a building,” he said, acknowledging the pull of a masthead people grew up with, “but we’ve grown the brand in a lot of different ways that are just really in keeping with the times that we live in.” That’s a company choosing to say the sentimental part out loud instead of burying it under a press release full of “strategic realignment” language, which is worth noticing even if it doesn’t change the outcome for anyone who liked holding the paper.

I think about this kind of shift more than the average reader, because several of the properties I work on are built for an audience in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, exactly the readers most likely to have grown up with a physical paper as the default and to feel a real loss when it goes away, even while reading everything else on a screen. A masthead disappearing and a newsroom disappearing are genuinely different events, and it’s worth being precise about which one actually happened here. MLive’s reporters are still covering Ann Arbor, Flint, Grand Rapids, and the rest. What’s gone is one specific, aging way of getting that reporting into a reader’s hands, not the reporting itself.

The workshops MLive is planning speak to the actual thing readers stand to lose here, and it’s a smaller thing than “the news” but a real one anyway: a habit. Reading the paper over coffee, in a specific chair, in a specific order, is a ritual as much as an information source, built over years and not easily replaced by an app that technically contains the same stories in a different shape. Losing that ritual is a legitimate thing to grieve a little, separate from any argument about whether the reporting itself survives the transition. Both things can be true. The coverage of Ann Arbor and Flint and Grand Rapids keeps going, and something specific about how a longtime subscriber used to start their morning is still gone.

MLive says it will run workshops to help longtime print subscribers move to the digital editions before December, which is a smaller, more practical kind of help than a company owes its readers in a moment like this, but not a nothing one either. For a reader who’s spent forty years starting the morning with ink on their fingers, that’s a real adjustment, not a footnote, and it deserves to be treated as one instead of waved off as a formality on the way to a cleaner balance sheet.

The post MLive announced in September 2026 that it will end print production entirely for eight of its Michigan newspapers, shifting those communities to digital only coverage after years of steadily declining print subscriptions across the whole state appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Nota had pitched itself as a fix for the news desert problem, using data from Northwestern’s Medill School to pick counties with thin or vanished local coverage, from California to Georgia, and building AI-written sites there instead. The pitch was that a community losing its last reporter didn’t have to lose local news entirely.

A news desert is a real place, not an abstract policy term: a county where the last local paper folded, or shrank to a skeleton crew covering a wider area than three reporters can reasonably drive to in a week. The people affected still have school board decisions, zoning fights, and local elections happening whether or not anyone’s writing them down, and Northwestern’s own tracking has documented the spread of these gaps across the country for years.

Nota positioned itself as the response to exactly that problem, which is part of why the plagiarism findings landed as hard as they did. This was a company claiming to solve a genuine civic problem while quietly depending on the very reporters it said the problem had left behind, a much heavier failure than simply cutting corners on a low-stakes product.

That was the pitch. Here’s what actually happened.

In Henrico County, Virginia, publisher Tom Lappas of the Henrico Citizen found that multiple stories on Nota’s local site were lightly reworded copies of his outlet’s reporting, with staff photos used without permission. His was one of at least 29 outlets whose work turned up, lightly rewritten but structurally intact, across more than 70 Nota stories, according to reporting from the journalism nonprofit Poynter.

At least 53 individual journalists had their reporting used without attribution. Lappas didn’t hear from the company directly once the story broke. “No one from Nota has reached out to apologize or explain how this happened,” he said.

The idea that AI could fill a reporting gap always rested on a specific assumption: that the shortage in a news desert is a shortage of writing. Get software to produce enough local stories, the thinking goes, and the coverage gap closes. What happened at Nota shows the assumption was backward from the start. Instead of generating original local coverage to fill an empty space, the company took coverage that already existed, produced by the exact reporters it claimed to be helping, and republished it as its own.

Even people inside the operation ended up saying as much. Jorge Rodríguez, one of Nota’s own reporters, told Poynter plainly: “I don’t believe Nota is a journalistic company at all.” CEO Josh Brandau didn’t dispute the core failure either, telling Poynter, “The fault absolutely lies with us in terms of keeping it open broadly to the web.”

What’s true, once the excuses fall away, is something local journalism has been saying for a while: reporting a place well requires someone who actually shows up to it. A city council meeting, a school board fight, a small business opening on a street that used to have three empty storefronts. Nobody has built software that attends those in person, asks a follow-up question when the official answer doesn’t add up, or knows which neighbor to call back. Nota’s own failure mode proves the point better than any defense of local journalism could. Faced with a genuine gap in original reporting, the fastest available option was to take someone else’s.

None of this means AI has no legitimate place in a newsroom. Plenty of outlets use it for transcription, data cleanup, or a first pass at a routine public-records summary, with a human editor checking the result before it runs. The difference is whether a human being who actually did the reporting is still in the loop, getting credit and getting paid. Nota’s model tried to remove that person from the equation entirely and still call the result local news.

What makes this specific failure sting more than a generic AI-content scandal is who it actually hurt. Nota republished the work of small outlets and individual local reporters, exactly the people already stretched thinnest by the coverage gaps Nota claimed to be filling, rather than anything belonging to a large media company that could absorb the loss. A freelance reporter in a shrinking newsroom, covering three towns because there’s no one left to cover the fourth, loses real, countable value when a better-funded AI product republishes their reporting without payment or credit. That harm already happened, to at least 53 people with names, beats, and editors who trusted them to file the story once, not to have it filed again somewhere else without their name on it.

I manage content for a living, some of it republished or reframed from existing material with permission, sourced, and credited by design, and the line Nota crossed is one I’d notice immediately in my own work, because it’s the same line that separates a legitimate rebrand from a lift.

Attribution is the part of the job that says, plainly, whose work this actually is, not a legal formality tacked onto the end of a piece. A company that skips that step is taking credit for someone else’s reporting and calling the result innovation, whatever softer word gets used in its own materials.

For readers, the honest takeaway is a smaller, more practical one than a lecture about AI in general. When a “local news” site with a name you don’t recognize shows up in a search result for your town, it’s worth a quick check of a byline and an about page before treating it the same as an outlet with a masthead and a phone number that rings through to an actual desk.

The reporters covering your specific city council meeting are doing something a script, however well trained, still can’t fake convincingly enough to survive scrutiny. Nota found that out the hard way, and so did at least 53 journalists whose work it borrowed without asking.

Correction, October 4, 2026: The earlier headline incorrectly said Nota shut its entire operation. The reported closure was its eleven-site local news network, not the whole company.

The post Nota shut its eleven-site AI local news network in 2026 after journalists found their reporting copied without attribution, while the company’s separate publishing-tool business remained distinct from that failed experiment appeared first on The Blog Herald.

That’s an ordinary, slightly boring confession, and it’s exactly why a stat like this one stopped me mid-scroll instead of sliding past.

The number is 68.01 percent. That’s the share of Google searches in the United States that ended without a single click to any website in the first four months of 2026, according to an analysis the research firm SparkToro published using Similarweb’s clickstream data.

Flip it around and you get the headline: fewer than one in three searches sends a person anywhere at all anymore. Most of the time, Google answers the question directly on the results page and the visit simply never happens.

That 68.01 percent isn’t one single thing. Some of it is searches Google has always answered on the page itself, like a quick weather check or a math conversion, the kind of query nobody expected to produce a click even a decade ago. A growing slice of it is newer: AI Overviews summarizing an entire topic, pulling from several sources at once, and putting a finished answer above every blue link on the page. The searcher gets what they came for. The sites that supplied the material for that answer, often several of them stitched together, get nothing they can measure.

Digital marketing researcher Rand Fishkin, SparkToro’s co-founder, doesn’t soften the framing. “Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden,” he wrote in the report.

That description matches what the clickstream numbers show, and it’s been building for years, from featured snippets to knowledge panels to, now, AI Overviews answering entire questions before a reader scrolls past the fold.

For a blog, the mechanism is simple even if the feeling isn’t. A search engine used to be a hallway that led somewhere. Increasingly, it doubles as the destination itself.

Here’s the part I’ll say plainly: for years, visitor count was treated at every property I’ve worked on as close to the entire scoreboard. That made sense when search reliably delivered people to a page. It makes a lot less sense when the search engine keeps most of them for itself and hands publishers the scraps.

A number that used to mean “the work is reaching people” now sometimes just means “the work is good enough that Google borrowed it to answer someone’s question, without sending them anywhere to read it.”

Fishkin’s advice to publishers watching this happen isn’t to fight harder for the old kind of click. “Replace traffic as a KPI for your digital marketing efforts,” he wrote, adding plainly: “Build a correlation dashboard instead.” The idea is to track whether your content’s visibility, even in zero-click form, correlates with outcomes that actually matter, whether that’s brand recall, direct visits from people who already know your name, or something else entirely, rather than treating raw click-throughs as the only metric worth watching.

Easier said than done, obviously. A correlation dashboard doesn’t produce the same satisfying jolt as watching a page count tick upward in real time, and plenty of the people this affects are paid, at least in part, on numbers that were designed for a version of the internet that’s already receding. I don’t have a tidy fix for that mismatch between what actually matters and what still gets measured. I just think it’s worth naming out loud instead of quietly pretending the old scoreboard still tells the whole story.

I won’t pretend that’s a comfortable shift for anyone whose job has revolved around one clean number for years. It isn’t comfortable for me either. But it lines up with something I already believe about work in general: the mistake is usually treating a big, vague goal as one giant unmovable thing instead of breaking it into smaller pieces you can actually check. “Grow traffic” was always a strange target to measure yourself against season after season, given how much of it depends on a platform nobody in this line of work actually controls. Watching that platform openly admit it’s becoming a walled garden is, oddly, permission to stop pretending otherwise.

What that looks like in practice, for me and for anyone else doing this work, is still being worked out in real time. Nobody I know has a finished playbook yet. What I’ve noticed, watching the dashboards rather than reading about them secondhand, is that properties built around a genuine, specific audience, the ones people seek out on purpose instead of stumbling into from a generic search, seem less shaken by a number like 68.01 percent.

Some of the sites I work on are written for women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who came looking for that specific voice and keep coming back for it, not for whoever ranks first this week. That’s an observation from someone who checks these numbers for a living, not a settled fact, but it’s a pattern I keep noticing across different properties, in different niches, for different reasons.

None of that makes the 68.01 percent figure less real, and I’m not interested in pretending a loyal core audience cancels out a structural shift this large. It just suggests the sites that survive this era well probably won’t be the ones that chased the algorithm hardest. They’ll be the ones a reader actually remembers the name of.

If you run a blog and just felt your stomach drop reading this, you aren’t imagining the shift. The search traffic era isn’t fully over, but it plainly isn’t the era most of our habits were built around anymore, and treating that as the actual starting point beats mourning a number that was already changing underneath us.

The post Less than one in three Google searches actually sends a visitor to someone else’s website anymore — here’s what that 2026 number means if your blog still lives on search traffic appeared first on The Blog Herald.

She had been born in 1899, two years before Federation gave Australia the borders and the government it still has. That birth year put the First World War, fought from 1914 to 1918, in her late teens and early twenties. It put the Depression that followed the 1929 crash in her thirties. It put the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, in her forties. She didn’t write about any of it as background history. It was just the middle stretch of an ordinary working life, the part most people her age had lived through too, except almost none of them were left to describe it firsthand anymore.

One of the people who helped her was a filmmaker named Michael Rubbo, to whom she dictated her posts. Together they called the blog The Life of Riley, and filled it with whatever Riley felt like telling people that week. There was no set schedule and no obvious theme beyond whatever had happened to her lately, which is a large part of why it reads less like a memoir project and more like an actual blog, written in real time by someone who happened to be a hundred and seven.

Her posts amounted to a kind of memoir almost nobody else still alive could have written: growing up in the outback mining town of Broken Hill, working as a farm cook and a bartender, and raising three children. Over the next year and a half she published 74 of them.

Blogging by 2007 was already close to a decade old as a mainstream habit, and it was mostly a habit of people young enough to have grown up around computers, typing in real time about their own lives. A dictated blog from a woman old enough to remember a world before radio broadcasting didn’t fit that pattern at all. It skipped the usual barrier to entry entirely: she never had to learn the software, never had to sit through the part where a new user gets frustrated and gives up. Somebody else handled the mechanics. All Riley had to do was talk, which by then she’d had a hundred and seven years of practice doing.

The blog found readers fast, and not because a 107-year-old blogger was a novelty act. She stayed in contact with correspondents worldwide, and in one entry she thanked them for “a whole swag of e-mails and comments from my Internet friends,” which reads less like someone managing an audience and more like someone genuinely surprised to have one. Coverage of her settled on the same shorthand, the one used in the headline announcing her death: the world’s oldest blogger.

Her family noticed the shift in her too. Her great-grandson, Darren Stone, later described how startled she was by the scale of it all, a woman well past a hundred who was suddenly hearing from strangers on other continents who genuinely wanted to know what she thought.

That went on until June 2008, when Riley fell ill and moved into a nursing home in Woy Woy, on the coast north of Sydney. She kept posting from there too, mentioning at one point that she was feeling weak with a cough that wouldn’t go away. The entries stayed just as warm as the illness allowed. She said of the care she was getting, “I’ve never been treated so well in all my life. The nurses can’t do enough for me.”

Her last post went up on June 26, 2008. In it, she described an ordinary afternoon with the woman in the next bed, whose daughter happened to be a professional singer: “She and I sang a happy song, as I do every day, and before long we were joined by several nurses, who sang along too. It was quite a concert!”

Two weeks later, on July 12, 2008, Olive Riley died. She was 108. By one count she left behind hundreds of descendants and thousands of readers online who had never met her, all of whom had spent the past year and a half checking the same blog for the same reason: to find out what she’d noticed that week.

A hundred and eight years is already a long stretch of personal history to have lived through, most of it before anyone thought to write any of it down. Families usually end up reconstructing that kind of life secondhand, piecing it together from other people’s memories once the person who actually lived it is gone. What made Riley’s final year and a half different was that nobody had to do that work for her. She was there for the telling, dictating one sentence at a time to somebody willing to sit down and type it, describing the wars and the hard years and the small good afternoons in her own words while she still could, rather than leaving it to whoever came after her to guess at the details.

What’s easy to miss in a headline like “the world’s oldest blogger” is how ordinary the actual writing was. Riley wasn’t performing wisdom or delivering some grand summary of a century. She was mostly just describing her week, the way anyone with a blog does, except her week happened to include a childhood in outback New South Wales, a working life that spanned two world wars, and a nursing home room she shared with a woman who liked to sing. That gap, between the size of the life and the smallness of the details she chose to write about, is most of what made people keep reading.

The post In 2007, a 107-year-old Australian woman who could no longer type began dictating a blog about surviving two world wars and the Great Depression, and kept posting until two weeks before she died at 108 appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Two pools, then a second cut

YouTube’s August 2026 Partner Program update, whose terms take effect February 1, 2027, lays out two separate revenue pools tied to its subscription tiers: creators share in 30% of net subscription revenue from standard Premium, and 60% from Premium Lite, the cheaper, ad-reduced tier YouTube has been rolling out market by market. Premium Lite still runs ads on Shorts, music and search. YouTube doesn’t explicitly tie that carve-out to the pool sizes, but by its own account the split “factors in the costs of operating and promoting the service, including amounts we pay to music partners” — leaving more of each subscription fee inside the pool creators draw from. Once that pool is allocated to individual creators based on member watch time and views, YouTube applies a second cut on top: 55% of a Premium Lite payout goes to long-form video, 45% to Shorts. Working through ppc.land’s breakdown of the announcement, that puts long-form creators at roughly a third of the Lite pool’s net revenue and Shorts creators at just over a quarter.

A ratio YouTube didn’t invent for this

What makes 55/45 worth pausing on is that YouTube didn’t design it specifically for Premium Lite. It’s the same split the platform has used for years to divide ordinary ad revenue between the two formats: per YouTube’s own Partner Program documentation, creators keep 55% of net ad revenue from a long-form video’s watch page, and 45% of the revenue allocated to them from the Shorts Creator Pool. The same announcement confirms the 55/45 formula applies to the standard Premium pool as well as Premium Lite. Two structurally different revenue streams, ads and subscriptions, spanning two different price tiers, and YouTube keeps arriving at the identical ten-point gap in favor of the longer format.

Where the raised bar fits in

The same announcement doubles what a new creator needs to enter the Partner Program at all: 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views in the trailing year or 90 days respectively, up from 4,000 hours or 10 million views, starting February 1, 2027, with the 1,000-subscriber requirement staying in place. Most coverage of that change has focused on who it locks out of the program entirely. Less discussed is what happens to the creators who clear the new bar either way. YouTube’s own announcement puts the program at over 3 million creators, and every one of them is entering, or already sitting inside, a payout structure where the format decision was made for them well before this update and simply carried forward, at the same ratio, into every new revenue stream YouTube has added since. A Shorts creator already earning has to keep clearing 10 million Shorts views every 90 days just to stay inside the Shorts Creator Pool at all — a maintenance bar that exists entirely apart from the 55/45 split waiting on the other side of it.

The dollars behind the percentage points

The pools involved aren’t small. YouTube and Google One together reported 325 million paying subscribers as of the fourth quarter of 2025, a jump of 25 million in three months, while total YouTube revenue for the year reached $60 billion, up 17% year over year; that outpaces the 9% year-over-year rise in Q4 ad revenue specifically, though the two figures span different windows — full-year versus a single quarter — and aren’t a precise apples-to-apples comparison. Subscriptions are the part of YouTube’s business expanding fastest, and Premium Lite, recently raised from $7.99 to $8.99 a month in the US, is the tier built specifically to convert viewers who’d otherwise watch free with ads. YouTube has told creators plainly that “partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads” once someone subscribes, which means every point of the 55/45 split is moving money through the fastest-growing part of the business rather than a shrinking one.

The volume doesn’t match the split

That ratio runs against how people actually watch. YouTube’s own figures put Shorts at over 200 billion views a day worldwide, a volume long-form video isn’t close to matching by view count. But the revenue math doesn’t run through view count directly — it runs through watch time first, then through a fixed percentage that was set independent of how any individual video performs. A Shorts creator can out-view a long-form creator by orders of magnitude and still end up dividing a smaller collective share of both the ad pool and the subscription pool. Popularity and payout rate are separate variables here, and YouTube’s formulas have never made them move together.

YouTube hasn’t published a rationale for why long-form gets the larger cut in either pool — its own materials explain the 60/30 gap between the two subscription tiers but say nothing about why the underlying 55/45 format split exists, or why it shows up twice in unrelated systems. It may simply be inherited: once a ratio is built into the ad-revenue infrastructure, reusing it for a new subscription pool is the easier engineering decision, not necessarily a fresh statement of priorities. Whatever the reason — deliberate prioritization or simple inheritance from the ad-revenue infrastructure — a company that wanted Shorts and long-form treated as equally valuable had two separate chances, in two unrelated revenue systems, to set that number at 50/50. It didn’t take either one, and YouTube hasn’t said why.

The post Premium Lite’s revenue split favors long-form 55/45 over Shorts — a ratio YouTube has reused, not invented, across its revenue systems appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Take that arrival away and there often isn’t a second engine to fall back on. Large outlets have apps, subscriber lists, and brand recognition built up over years. A two-person regional outlet or a specialist blog usually has none of that cushion. So when the mechanics of a Google search change, the effect doesn’t land evenly across the internet. It lands hardest on the publishers with the least room to absorb it, and for some of them, the traffic loss is close to existential rather than a line item to manage around.

Two data sets released months apart in 2026 put real numbers on that imbalance. Rand Fishkin, co-founder of the audience-research firm SparkToro, found that 68 percent of Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website. Separately, Sara Fischer, reporting an analysis of Chartbeat data for Axios, found that the smallest publishers lost 60 percent of their search referral traffic in just two years, a decline roughly three times steeper than what large publishers experienced over the same stretch.

What a search used to owe a website

Searching Google has never guaranteed a click. Some share of searchers have always gotten their answer from the snippet, the weather box, or the calculator built into the results page. But that share used to be closer to a coin flip than a foregone conclusion. Fishkin’s tracking put the zero-click rate at 60.45 percent in 2024, meaning a little under four in ten searches still sent someone to an outside page. By early 2026, that had slid further. “In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click,” Fishkin wrote, describing a jump he attributes largely to AI Overviews, the summaries Google began placing at the top of results pages that answer a question directly rather than pointing to a source for it.

Google introduced that feature as a way to have search do more of the work for the person typing the query, pulling information from multiple pages into one synthesized answer instead of asking the reader to visit each source in turn. For a reader, that can save a genuine step. For the sites that used to be that step, it’s a different story. Fishkin’s research also found that when an AI Overview appears above a search result, the click-through rate on the organic listings below it drops by close to 60 percent, which helps explain why the zero-click share keeps climbing even as the total number of searches keeps growing.

Neither study proves that one number caused the other. Fishkin’s figure covers the whole of Google search across every kind of query; the Chartbeat data covers a specific slice of publishers over a specific window. What lines up is the timing. Google’s rollout of AI-generated summaries at the top of search results began broadly in the United States in May 2024, sitting almost exactly inside the two-year period Chartbeat measured. Worth naming plainly: a shared timeline is a correlation, and a correlation is a long way from a proven cause, even when two trend lines move together this closely.

A dip for some, a collapse for others

Averages hide distribution, and this one hides a wide one. The 68 percent figure describes the whole of Google search, not any single publisher’s experience. Fischer’s numbers show the gap directly: “referral traffic from traditional search engines has declined by 60% for small publishers, compared with 47% for medium-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers, per Chartbeat.” In that breakdown, small publishers are outlets averaging between 1,000 and 10,000 daily page views, roughly the size of a well-read local news site or an active hobbyist blog. Large publishers, by contrast, are sites pulling more than 100,000 daily views, the scale of an established national outlet.

A 22 percent drop is a real loss for a large publisher; ad sales teams have built entire forecasting models around smaller swings than that. A national outlet losing a fifth of its search traffic and a small outlet losing three fifths of it are different events by any reasonable measure. The larger site typically still has direct traffic from a loyal readership, an app people open out of habit, or a newsletter list built over a decade. The smaller site, more often than not, was leaning on search to do most of that work in the first place.

Why size changes what the same headline means

Part of the gap traces back to what kind of content each tier tends to publish. Small, independent sites disproportionately run on informational queries: how something works, what a word means, how to fix a specific problem. Those are exactly the queries an AI Overview is built to answer directly, because the answer is short, factual, and doesn’t require the nuance or original reporting that a large newsroom might bring to a breaking story. A well-known outlet covering a fast-moving news event still tends to get the click, because an AI summary of a still-developing story is a riskier substitute than an AI summary of a settled fact.

The other part is capacity. A large publisher losing a fifth of its search traffic can shift budget toward newsletters, apps, or syndication deals and buy itself time to adjust. A small publisher rarely has the staff or the runway to build a second distribution channel from scratch while its main one is shrinking underneath it. Some of the outlets in Chartbeat’s smallest tier are one or two people running a site as a side project or a small business. For those publishers, a 60 percent drop in referral traffic over two years isn’t a metric to optimize around. It’s closer to a countdown.

Taken together, these two studies describe a widening gap more than a single event. Search itself is sending fewer people anywhere at all, and whatever traffic is still flowing out is increasingly flowing toward publishers who already had the resources to survive without it. The publishers who needed that traffic most are the ones now watching the most of it disappear.

The post A 2026 study of search behavior found that 68 percent of Google searches now end without a single click, and small publishers lost 60 percent of their referral traffic in just two years. appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What the survey actually measured

Eb Gargano’s Blogging Income Survey 2025 collected anonymous Typeform responses from 187 bloggers between January 24 and April 21, 2025, drawn mostly from her own email list, course students and Facebook group, skewed toward English-speaking countries and bloggers already focused on monetizing. Alongside total monthly earnings, Gargano’s survey tracks something most income reports skip: RPM, or revenue per thousand pageviews, broken out by how long each respondent had been blogging. RPM strips out the effect of traffic size and asks a narrower question: how much is each visitor worth, on average, once a blogger settles into their monetization mix.

The rate falls exactly where the money should be at its best

Gargano’s cohort breakdown moves in one direction for most of a blog’s life, then reverses. Bloggers under a year in averaged an RPM of $10.99. That climbed to $21.61 for the 1-to-3-year group, $24.97 for 3-to-5 years, and $52.59 for 5-to-10 years — a steady, unsurprising climb as bloggers learn what their audience will pay for. Then, at the 10-year mark, it drops to $43.41. Bloggers who have survived the longest, built the biggest archives and presumably learned the most about their own audience are earning less per thousand pageviews than bloggers who’ve been at it for as little as five years.

Total monthly income follows a different, uninterrupted curve, which is part of why the RPM dip is easy to miss unless a survey specifically isolates it. Average earnings run $2.42 a month under a year in, $205.44 by year one to three, $1,044.91 by year three to five, $2,621.24 by year five to ten, and $5,624.91 past the decade mark. Every stage looks like unambiguous progress if income is the only number on the page. The rate is the number that turns over.

The traffic still wins the month

That drop in rate doesn’t show up as a drop in income, because the 10-year-plus group isn’t playing the same traffic game. Gargano’s data puts average monthly pageviews at 49,841 for the 5-to-10-year cohort and 129,562 for bloggers past year ten — roughly 2.6 times more. Multiply pageviews by RPM and the math resolves the apparent contradiction: $5,624.91 a month for the veterans against $2,621.24 for the 5-to-10-year group, more than double. A decade of accumulated posts, backlinks and search rankings buys enough extra traffic to outrun a worse rate per visitor. It doesn’t buy back the rate itself.

What’s actually dragging the rate down

Gargano’s own read points at monetization mix, not fatigue or algorithm penalties. “Most of the bloggers in this category get the majority of their income from ads,” she writes of the 10-plus-year group. “Many get almost 100% of their income from ads and, according to the data, ads deliver the lowest RPMs of all the different blog monetization methods.” She adds a second, compounding factor: bloggers who’ve been running a site for over a decade are “likely to have a lot of poor quality, out of date and/or unoptimized content” sitting alongside their newer posts, diluting the average value of every pageview the archive generates.

The size of the gap ads are leaving on the table

The survey’s own numbers make the ads-heavy strategy look worse the closer you look. Display ads across Gargano’s full sample averaged an RPM of $33.80. Digital products averaged $283.64 — not a marginal difference but roughly eight times the return per thousand pageviews. A blogger converting even a modest share of ad-supported traffic into email subscribers and a paid product isn’t chasing a nice-to-have upgrade. The survey doesn’t isolate how much of the gap between the 5-to-10-year and 10-plus-year cohorts traces to monetization mix specifically, but it’s Gargano’s own leading explanation for the drop.

What the sample can and can’t tell a reader

Gargano is upfront about who answered the survey: respondents skew toward her own email list, course students and Facebook group, which means the sample leans toward bloggers already treating their site as a business rather than a hobby. A 10-plus-year blogger who never tried to monetize seriously in the first place wouldn’t necessarily show up here at all, and the RPM figures likely understate how much worse the gap looks across the full population of aging, half-abandoned blogs that never had an income-focused audience reading along. If anything, that bias should make the 10-year RPM drop harder to dismiss, not easier — it’s showing up inside a sample stacked with people who are actively trying to monetize well.

This doesn’t mean blogging gets worse with time. The traffic compounds, the archive compounds, and by year ten a blog with any monetization at all is likely earning more in absolute terms than it did at year five. What compounds alongside it, for a meaningful share of long-running blogs, is a growing pile of old content still running the least efficient way to make money on it. The bloggers who avoid the RPM drop are the ones who keep changing what they sell as the decade goes on, rather than letting an aging monetization mix ride on accumulated traffic alone.

The post Bloggers past the 10-year mark earn more than double what 5-to-10-year bloggers make each month, but a 2025 survey of 187 bloggers found their revenue per pageview is actually lower appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What film school actually costs when it isn’t unofficial

The traditional route has a price tag attached to every stage of it. The American Film Institute’s conservatory program runs $72,954 for the 2025-2026 year, and Columbia’s MFA in film runs $77,840 a year in tuition for the first two full-time years, dropping to a reduced “Research Arts” rate for any additional years spent finishing a thesis — a path that can approach $200,000 in tuition alone before housing. Boston University’s film program runs over $90,000 annually; even an in-state public film degree can land between $7,000 and $23,000 a year before production costs. The debt follows students out the door: the Education Data Initiative puts median debt for a film and photographic-arts bachelor’s degree at $26,005, and for a film master’s at $99,757 — more than double the typical master’s-degree debt load, though it’s not the highest figure in that data set; majors like dance and design carry even more. A YouTube upload costs whatever the camera and the creator’s time are worth, and if it fails, nobody owes a lender anything.

The feedback loop film school can’t match

Tuition buys structured critique, but not much of it. A film student gets maybe a handful of graded screenings a semester, judged by a small faculty and a rotating cast of classmates. A YouTube upload gets judged by however many strangers click on it, within hours, in a comment section that doesn’t grade on a curve.

Curry Barker, who dropped out of the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus with creative partner Cooper Tomlinson to start a channel called That’s a Bad Idea, has described the difference less as quality control and more as a cure for overthinking: “Any aspiring filmmaker’s worst nightmare is being paralyzed,” he told The Wrap, describing how the channel forced him to write things he and Tomlinson could actually shoot that week instead of waiting for a script to feel finished. A festival submission gets one verdict, months later. A YouTube upload gets a verdict by the weekend, and there’s a next one already in the queue.

Practice at a volume no curriculum allows

Barker’s public output before his 2025 breakout, “Obsession,” wasn’t one polished thesis film — it was years of visibly uneven attempts. A nine-episode web series called “Roommates” in 2018 and 2019. A 22-minute short called “The Chair” made for around $2,000 in 2023. Then his actual directorial debut: a found-footage horror feature called “Milk & Serial,” shot for $800 in 2024, that sat without a distributor for a year before Barker put it on YouTube for free. Each one is a public rep, watched and judged in real time, in a way a film-school student doesn’t get to log more than a few times before graduation. Volume is the entire mechanism: a curriculum built around four or five supervised projects over four years can’t replicate what a platform allows when the only cost of another attempt is making it.

When the body can’t do it, the software has to

Parsons’ path shows what that practice looks like when it’s forced rather than chosen. His arthritis diagnosis at 13 limited the kind of physical, hands-on production other teenage filmmakers could do — the running-around-with-a-camcorder version of learning the craft. He leaned into software, animation and VFX tools instead, teaching himself the pipeline a film-school cinematography track would have handed him piece by piece over several semesters. By the time “The Backrooms” went viral, he’d spent years uploading practice work nobody outside his own subscriber base was watching closely, which is precisely the condition under which a person is free to be bad at something without consequence.

Failing on camera, on purpose

Danny and Michael Philippou, who built the horror-comedy channel RackaRacka before either of them had a feature credit, describe the same mechanism more bluntly. “You want to make that initial stuff and fail like that,” Michael told No Film School. “That stuff… is a lesson that you take forward for the next thing.” His own follow-up makes the same point more plainly: “The best advice, really, is to just start making stuff.” Danny’s phrasing in the same conversation was blunter still: “Just get started. You have to.” Neither brother frames their early, rougher videos as embarrassing detours on the way to competence. They frame them as the mechanism competence came from — public, low-stakes, and repeatable in a way no film-school assignment schedule allows.

Film school and YouTube are now running in parallel

That doesn’t mean the traditional path is disappearing. Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts had a higher-than-expected yield this admissions cycle and ended up oversubscribed, according to The Ankler — the opposite of what a “YouTube killed film school” narrative would predict. USC film school dean Elizabeth Daley put the moment in context rather than alarm: “This is a cyclical business in terms of new generations coming up.” One path hasn’t replaced the other. A path that used to require an acceptance letter now also has an on-ramp that only requires an upload button, and both are currently producing directors Hollywood wants.

The two pipelines are optimizing for different things. Film school still teaches the parts of the job that a comment section can’t — sound design theory, production management, how a crew actually runs — and a faculty screening still catches craft problems an anonymous audience won’t articulate. What YouTube supplies is the one input structured education has never been able to offer at scale: enough cheap, public, immediate failure to get good before anyone with a checkbook is watching.

The post YouTube didn’t become an unofficial film school by accident. It became one because creators could fail publicly there, over and over, until they got good appeared first on The Blog Herald.

That version of events isn’t hard to believe. AI detection has gotten good enough to flag machine-written prose at scale, and sightings of obviously synthetic listings, ones with nonsensical author bios or covers that look assembled from the same three templates, have been easy to find in genres like romance and thriller. The assumption that follows feels almost like common sense: more AI books on the virtual shelf should mean more AI dollars landing in someone’s pocket.

A 2026 analysis by Tuhin Chakrabarty and three co-authors at Stony Brook University, Columbia Law School, and the University of Michigan tested that assumption directly instead of taking it on faith. The team ran full-text AI detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction ebooks sold on Amazon between January 2023 and March 2026, matching each title to its own daily sales record through the end of June 2026.

They used a detector called Pangram v3.3, which its developers report catches AI-generated text with a false-positive rate of just 0.04 percent, and sorted every book into one of three buckets based on how much of its text the tool flagged as machine-generated: none, light exposure at 25 percent or under, and substantial exposure above that threshold. That threshold matters. A book that used AI for a light copyedit or a few transitional paragraphs lands in a different category than one built mostly from generated text, and the study treats them separately rather than lumping every book that touched a chatbot into one pile.

The results complicate the flooding story rather than confirming it. According to the study, books with substantial AI text made up 20 percent of the catalog analyzed, but captured only 12.1 percent of unit sales and 11.3 percent of revenue. Books with no detected AI text, by contrast, made up 62.9 percent of the catalog and pulled in 72.5 percent of the revenue. As the researchers put it, these books “make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales.”

That gap is real. It doesn’t cancel out what comes next, though. The same data show AI-heavy books gaining ground over time, winning a growing share of sales and taking more of the scarce top-rank positions once held by books with no detected AI text. A fifth of the catalog earning an eighth of the money looks, at first glance, like proof the flooding strategy is failing. Followed across three years, it starts to look more like a foothold.

The bigger shift might not be about AI-generated books specifically at all. Across the period studied, the researchers found that the cumulative catalog of released titles grew 38.3-fold and the number of books selling in a given quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. Thousands of new titles, AI-assisted and human-written alike, poured onto virtual shelves far faster than buyers showed up to pay for them. Revenue per selling book fell across most genres, and books with no AI text lost the most ground specifically in genres where AI-generated titles had spread the furthest, especially where Kindle Unlimited availability was high.

Kindle Unlimited matters here because it changes how a book earns money in the first place. Instead of a single purchase price, KU pays authors per page read from a shared pool, which rewards volume and frequent new releases more than it rewards any single title selling well. A catalog strategy built around publishing often, even with heavily AI-assisted books, can do reasonably well under those incentives even while any individual title underperforms on its own. That helps explain why the erosion for human-written books wasn’t evenly spread. It concentrated in exactly the genres and pricing models most exposed to volume publishing.

A second finding buried in the same dataset speaks less to sales and more to originality. Among top-selling titles, the researchers found that books with substantial AI text drew on more distinctive language already present in existing books than human-written top sellers did, and that this overlap climbed alongside revenue. Books with no detected AI text showed no such pattern. The authors note this bears on the market-effect question at the center of fair-use arguments over copyright, since one legal test for whether a use is fair asks whether it substitutes for the original work in the marketplace.

A browsing reader couldn’t have worked any of this out on their own. Amazon listings don’t disclose whether a book contains AI-generated text, and the researchers needed full-text detection software run against the entire manuscript, not just a skim of the sample pages Amazon shows before purchase, to sort the catalog this precisely. A cover, a blurb, and a few free pages simply don’t carry enough signal either way. That’s part of why the flooding narrative took hold in the first place: the visible evidence, a handful of obviously synthetic listings, was easy to spot, while the actual sales math required a proprietary sales panel and machine detection run across full manuscripts before anyone could see it clearly.

It’s worth sitting with what this data can and can’t tell you. This is one dataset, covering self-published genre fiction specifically rather than all of Amazon’s catalog, and it’s a preprint that hasn’t yet gone through peer review. The findings describe an association between detected AI text and sales performance across a large sample, not a controlled experiment into why any individual reader bought or skipped a given book. Detectors also aren’t flawless. Even at a reported false-positive rate of 0.04 percent, a sample of this size will misclassify some titles in both directions, and genre-fiction ebooks are not the same market as, say, self-published nonfiction or hardcover releases.

What the numbers do support is a narrower claim than the one usually repeated. AI-generated books aren’t quietly draining the same dollars away from human authors, title for title, the way the flooding story implies. They’re doing something slower and, in some ways, harder to counter.

By adding volume the market didn’t ask for, they’re making the whole shelf more crowded and slightly less profitable to sell into, whether or not the book sitting next to them was touched by a machine at all.

The post A study of nearly 15,000 self-published Amazon books found that titles heavy with AI-generated content now make up a fifth of the catalog, but earn barely one in eight sales dollars. appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What TikTok actually changed

The Creator Rewards Program, which replaced the Creativity Program Beta, requires creators to be 18 or older, have at least 10,000 followers, and have logged 100,000 views in the trailing 30 days. Only videos longer than one minute qualify, a threshold TikTok tied directly to the fact that its own users now spend half their time on the app watching videos over a minute long. Payout is calculated from four factors — originality, play duration, search value and engagement — plus a separate automatic reward tied to ad watch time. None of those four factors reward a creator simply for publishing more. They reward creators for making videos other people finish watching, which is a much narrower category than “videos that exist.”

TikTok’s own numbers show why the company bothered rewriting the formula at all. When it announced the shift out of beta in March 2024, TechCrunch reported that TikTok claimed total creator revenue had risen more than 250% in the prior six months compared with the old, since-shuttered Creator Fund, which had become notorious for paying creators a few dollars on videos with millions of views. That 250% figure describes the total pool, not what any individual creator took home, and TechCrunch noted the same six months saw viewership of over-one-minute videos climb nearly 40% — meaning some of that revenue growth reflects a platform-wide shift toward longer content, and the formula itself may not have gotten proportionally more generous. The distinction matters: growing the pool and narrowing who qualifies to draw from it are two different moves, and TikTok did both at once.

YouTube’s version of the same fix

YouTube made a structurally similar move in August 2026, when it announced on its official blog that new applicants to the Partner Program will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the trailing year, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days, starting February 1, 2027 — double the 4,000-hour bar that had stood since 2018. Creators already inside the program keep their existing status; the new bar only applies to whoever is trying to get in after it takes effect. YouTube framed the reason as scale rather than creator misbehavior, saying it needs to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube,” which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and more than a billion hours of watch time on TV every day. And YouTube said the quiet part plainly: it expects “to pay even more to creators in 2027 than we did in 2026.”

The same update adds a second, ongoing gate that only applies to Shorts earnings: creators already in the program must maintain 10 million qualified Shorts views over a trailing 90 days to keep collecting Shorts revenue specifically. Fall below that and a channel doesn’t get removed from the Partner Program outright — its Shorts payments just pause until the number recovers, a mechanic that recurs on a rolling basis — a standing quality check on the video type YouTube considers easiest to flood with low-effort volume, not a one-time entry exam.

The same lever, pulled two different ways

TikTok’s fix operates on quality — it decides which videos, from an already-eligible creator, are worth paying for. YouTube’s fix operates on eligibility — it decides which channels get to enter the payout pool at all. Both levers do the same underlying job: they reduce the number of claims on a finite amount of ad money, so each remaining claim is worth more. YouTube’s own framing makes the mechanism explicit. Raising the bar to 8,000 hours doesn’t grow ad revenue by itself; it narrows who’s eligible to split it, which is exactly how a platform can credibly promise to “pay even more” without needing advertisers to spend more per creator. TikTok’s originality-and-completion formula does the equivalent work one video at a time instead of one channel at a time.

Why this should worry more than video creators

Every content platform monetized by advertising eventually runs into this same math: ad budgets grow linearly, if they grow at all, while the number of people trying to earn from those budgets grows however fast sign-ups allow. Blogs monetized through display ads and affiliate networks sit inside the identical pool logic — RPMs are a function of how many other publishers are chasing the same advertiser dollars in the same niche, not just how good any one blog is. The platforms with the leverage to police entry, the way TikTok and YouTube just did, will keep doing it whenever the math stops working. The platforms without that leverage, including most blogs, don’t get to raise a bar. They just watch their per-visitor revenue erode as more competitors show up to split it.

What happens to the creators on the wrong side of each line

Neither company frames its change as a loss for anyone, and in a narrow sense that’s accurate: nobody currently earning from either program loses access retroactively. But a channel that would have qualified for YouTube monetization under the old 4,000-hour bar and doesn’t clear 8,000 after February 2027 experiences the change as a wall regardless of how it’s described in a blog post, and a TikTok creator whose videos rack up views without holding attention past the first few seconds experiences the new formula as a pay cut regardless of how TikTok frames “originality.” The two platforms picked different filters — one runs on time served, the other on content judged in the moment — but creators on the losing side of either filter are the ones actually paying for the “pay even more” promise made to everyone else.

The post TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program and YouTube’s new watch-hour wall are solving the same problem for two different platforms: too many creators, too little payout to go around appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The person who said so out loud was Chris Best, Substack’s co-founder and CEO. Speaking onstage at The Information’s Future of Influence event in Los Angeles in June 2025, Best said “more than 50 people” were making over $1 million a year on the platform. The comment came out unscripted, in the middle of a conversation, the kind of figure a company usually keeps close until legal and marketing have signed off on the wording. It landed the way unplanned numbers tend to land: fast, and everywhere, within hours.

The moment it slipped out

The clearest sign that this was an unplanned disclosure came from inside Substack itself. Within hours of Best’s comment making the rounds online, Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s other co-founder, posted a note of his own: “Oh shit, didn’t realize we were disclosing this.” McKenzie’s note reads like genuine, in-the-moment surprise at watching a private number go public, posted the same evening Best said it.

That kind of reaction rarely happens by accident. Companies generally control what gets said about their own revenue and their own top earners, especially when the number is this flattering. A co-founder’s half-panicked note is a small, human confirmation that the figure was a real answer to a real question, given by someone who hadn’t quite worked out yet what happens once a number like that gets loose in the world.

What five years actually did

Whatever prompted the disclosure, the underlying shift is real, and it shows up in the platform’s own subscription numbers. Axios reported that Substack’s paid subscriptions grew from about 100,000 in July 2020 to more than 5 million by March 2025, roughly a fiftyfold increase in five years. That’s a jump big enough to turn a promising, unproven place to write into one where a few dozen people can apparently run a media business at seven-figure scale, without a network, a studio, or a masthead behind them.

Five years ago, the honest answer to whether someone could make a living writing a newsletter was maybe, for a handful of already-known writers, if the timing worked out. The honest answer now comes with a number attached to the top of that range, and the number is high enough to change what “maybe” means for everyone still climbing toward it.

Why now, and not five years earlier

Part of the answer is timing that had little to do with Substack itself. Newsrooms spent the years between 2020 and 2025 cutting staff on a scale that pushed a lot of experienced reporters and columnists to look for income that didn’t depend on one employer’s ad budget. A subscription newsletter, paid for directly by a few thousand readers instead of approved by an editor, was one of the few options that let an established writer keep a byline and set their own terms.

The other part is simpler. Five years ago, asking a reader to hand over a monthly card payment for a newsletter was still a hard sell, competing against a habit of expecting most writing online to be free. By 2025, that habit had loosened enough that a reader already paying for three or four other subscriptions barely noticed adding one more. Substack didn’t create that shift by itself, but it built the checkout button that a critical mass of readers were, by then, willing to click.

Fifty people, or fifty small operations

It’s worth being precise about what Best’s number does and doesn’t describe. “More than 50 people” earning over $1 million a year is a statement about income at the top of the platform. It says nothing about how that income gets produced. Some of those newsletters are probably one person handling everything: writing, editing, answering comments, running the business side alone. Others are more likely small operations, with an editor, a researcher, or a couple of contributors splitting the byline and the workload. A seven-figure newsletter run by four people and a seven-figure newsletter run by one person both count toward the same total, and they represent very different amounts of individual effort.

That distinction doesn’t make the figure less real. It changes what the figure is evidence of: a ceiling that’s newly reachable on the platform, not a job description that applies evenly to everyone chasing it.

The number also says nothing about how long any of those fifty-plus newsletters will stay above the line. A newsletter’s income depends on renewals, and renewals depend on readers deciding, year after year, that the writing is still worth the price. Crossing seven figures once, in 2025, is not the same as staying there in 2030.

A number that didn’t exist to report

What makes this moment different from a routine growth statistic is that five years ago, there was no comparable figure available to disclose, flattering or not. A platform can’t reveal that dozens of independent writers cleared $1 million a year when the entire platform hadn’t yet proven a handful of writers could clear six figures. The number Best said onstage only became sayable because enough individual newsletters had already gotten there first, one subscription at a time.

Whether that pace holds for the next five years is an open question, and Substack itself doesn’t seem to have a rehearsed answer, going by how quickly its own co-founder reacted to the number getting loose. What’s confirmed for now is narrower and more specific than any claim about the future of media. A threshold nobody could point to in 2020 has a number attached to it in 2025, and that number came from the person best positioned to know it.

For anyone weighing whether to start a newsletter of their own, that number is worth reading as a ceiling rather than a floor. Most writers on Substack do not clear six figures, let alone seven, and the platform has never claimed otherwise. What changed in five years is that the top of the range moved somewhere it hadn’t been before, far enough that even a skeptical audience had to notice.

The post More than 50 newsletters on Substack are now earning over a million dollars a year, according to the platform’s own co-founder — a milestone that didn’t exist five years ago. appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What five years of the same survey actually shows

Gargano’s Blogging Income Survey 2026 collected anonymous Typeform responses from 129 bloggers between January 2 and April 29, 2026, drawn largely from her own email list, courses and paid community, and skewing toward bloggers already focused on monetization. Most respondents were based in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The headline numbers are blunt. It takes an average of 21 months for a blogger to earn their first dollar, though the median is 12 months and just over a quarter of respondents earned something within six months of starting. Reaching what a respondent personally considered a full-time income took an average of 4 years and 1 month, with a median of 4 years — up from a 3-year median last year — and 24% of this year’s bloggers hit that mark within two years, down from 28% last year. Gargano’s own read of the data, after five years of running the same survey, is direct: “it’s clearly getting harder to ‘break in’ to blogging, and it’s taking longer to get to a decent full-time income.”

The other half never earns a cent

That four-year runway assumes the blog eventually turns a profit at all, and a lot of them don’t. In February 2019, Kyle Byers at GrowthBadger surveyed 1,117 self-identified bloggers, split them into bloggers earning over $50,000 a year and everyone else, and found that a little less than half of the lower-income group made any money from their blog at all. Of the roughly 47% who did, the two most common methods were Google AdSense and affiliate marketing, the lowest-effort and lowest-control monetization options on the list. The gap between the two groups traced back to specific, repeatable choices: bloggers earning over $50,000 were 4.3 times as likely to do keyword research, used more than three times as many email list-building tactics, and were 5.6 times as likely to sell a product or service they controlled themselves.

“Full-time” and “financially sustainable” aren’t the same claim

Even a self-reported full-time income doesn’t settle whether the work actually supports someone long-term. A report from the Center for News, Technology & Innovation, published in April 2026, surveyed 43 independent writers and creators and conducted in-depth interviews with 26 of them. Only 5 of the 43 said their content income could fully fund their lifestyle. Just over half, 23 of 43, said they couldn’t fund their lifestyle from the work at all. The report covers independent writers and creators broadly rather than bloggers specifically, but the shape of its finding matches what both blogging surveys show separately: a small top tier making a living, and a much larger group for whom the work is a side project, a portfolio piece, or an experiment that hasn’t paid off yet.

What actually separates the two groups

Byers’ data gets more useful once “over $50,000” stops being treated as a single trait and starts getting read as a bundle of specific decisions. Higher-income bloggers in his survey rated Google organic search 83% more valuable than lower-income bloggers did, and rated email marketing 192% more valuable. Their most popular posts averaged 2,424 words, 83% longer than the top posts from lower-income bloggers, and they paid outside writers $347 per article against $96. The survey measures correlation.

Byers is upfront that adopting these habits out of order or too early can backfire. But it describes a business run with the rigor of any other small business — a different animal from a hobby that occasionally throws off ad revenue.

Gargano’s 2026 data points the same direction from a different angle: bloggers who did email marketing earned roughly twice as much as those who didn’t, and bloggers using four or more revenue streams out-earned single-stream bloggers by a wide margin.

Why the timeline keeps stretching

Neither survey pins down exactly why the under-five-year cohort lost ground this year while the ten-year-plus cohort gained it, but the direction fits what’s been happening to organic discovery generally: a newer site has less accumulated authority, fewer backlinks and a thinner archive to fall back on right as search traffic gets harder for everyone to earn. A blog compounding content, links and an email list since 2016 has a cushion a blog started in 2024 hasn’t had time to build. That lines up with Gargano’s own explanation for the split: bloggers past the five-year mark, she notes, “tend to have more revenue streams than bloggers who have been blogging for less than 5 years and they tend to be monetizing via more lucrative revenue streams.”

Blogging isn’t a bad bet. It’s a slower, less evenly distributed one than the “start a blog, quit your job” pitch suggests. The bloggers clearing $50,000 a year are running a small media business, complete with keyword research, an email list and diversified income streams, and they got there by staying past the point where most people quit, well beyond the four-year mark Gargano’s data says is typical now.

The post Is blogging still profitable? The bloggers who reach a full-time income wait an average of four years to get there, and the wait is getting longer, not shorter appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What the zero-click number actually measures

SparkToro’s analysis covers desktop and mobile web searches, weighted two-to-one mobile-to-desktop, but excludes Google’s mobile app, where zero-click behavior is reportedly even more aggressive. The rise itself isn’t new: zero-click search has been climbing steadily since at least 2016, driven first by featured snippets, knowledge panels, and direct-answer boxes, long before generative AI entered a results page. What’s new is the slope of the climb.

What AI Overviews specifically add

AI Overviews now appear on more than 20% of all Google searches. Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords, split evenly between searches with an AI Overview present and similar informational searches without one, and found that as of December 2025, the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page than a comparable keyword without one — up from the 34.5% reduction Ahrefs measured when it first ran the analysis in 2025. Ahrefs’ Ryan Law was blunt about the gap between that finding and Google’s own public claims: “It seems that Google doesn’t want us to see the clickthrough rate for AI Overviews.” Pew Research found a similar pattern independently: searches that triggered an AI summary produced a click only 8% of the time, versus 15% for searches without one.

The metric change bloggers are already seeing in Search Console

Anyone checking Google Search Console for their own blog has probably noticed a pattern that used to be unusual: impressions climbing while clicks fall, instead of moving together the way they always used to. Ahrefs calls this “the great decoupling” and traces it to two mechanical causes. AI Overviews often cite several source URLs at once for a single query, spreading impressions across multiple sites instead of concentrating them on whichever result ranks first — and when an AI Overview answers the question directly, a person has no reason to click through to any of the cited sources at all. Ahrefs found the correlation between impressions and clicks across its own tracked data flipped from a positive 0.425 in late 2024 to a negative 0.352 by early 2025, around the same time Google’s March 2025 core update roughly doubled how often an AI Overview appeared. A blog’s impressions going up is no longer, on its own, good news.

Who’s actually losing traffic, and who isn’t

The decline isn’t evenly distributed. Digital Content Next tracked Google search referrals for 19 major publishers and found a median year-over-year decline of 10% in May and June 2025 — 14% among non-news publishers, a smaller 7% among news publishers. Branded searches move the opposite direction: according to research from marketing agency Amsive, reported by Search Engine Journal, AI Overviews are associated with an 18% increase in click-through rate when someone searches for a specific site or brand by name rather than a general topic. That split matters more than the headline zero-click number: a blog that ranks for “how to grow an email list” is exposed to the full brunt of the AI Overview effect, while a blog whose readers search by name is largely insulated from it.

What publishers are actually doing instead of waiting it out

The publishers already living with this aren’t treating it as a search-optimization problem to be patched. Reach’s David Higgerson described the shift bluntly in comments to the BBC, reported by Search Engine Journal: “We’ve got millions of people who receive our alerts on WhatsApp. We’ve built newsletters.” Bauer Media’s Stuart Forrest made a related but distinct point about what still works inside search itself, framing it as a content-quality problem rather than a technical one: publishers need to be the site an AI Overview cites instead of a rival, and “it’s amazing the number of publishers that just give up on” doing that well. Both point toward the same underlying shift: an audience a publisher owns directly — a subscriber list, an app, a community — doesn’t lose value when Google changes how a results page looks, because Google was never what was holding that relationship together.

What this means for a blog that lives on organic search

A blogger whose traffic comes almost entirely from Google is exposed to a trend that started before generative AI and has now picked up speed because of it, and neither Google’s own explanations nor a single SEO fix are likely to reverse it. The workable response looks like what larger publishers are already doing at a bigger scale: building a channel Google doesn’t control, whether that’s a newsletter, a podcast feed, or a community, so a chunk of the audience arrives without going through a results page at all. Building that channel won’t recover lost search traffic. It puts a ceiling on how much of the business any single results-page redesign can threaten.

The post Zero-click Google searches passed two-thirds in early 2026, and the newest data shows AI Overviews didn’t start that trend — they just sped it up appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What Beehiiv actually shipped

The centerpiece is Community: a discussion space attached to a creator’s newsletter where subscribers can talk to each other, which creators can moderate and gate behind a paid tier. CEO Tyler Denk’s explanation for building it was specific: “People following your content have a shared interest in what you’re creating, but they can’t communicate with each other… being able to have a community where your audience can actually engage with one another is super valuable.” Alongside it, an AI Copilot analyzes a newsletter’s content and audience metrics to suggest growth moves and draft outreach campaigns, and the editor got a split-screen redesign showing edits and the rendered preview at once. Beehiiv said its programmatic ad network now pays publishers on the platform more than $1 million a month in aggregate.

A creator can export a Beehiiv subscriber list in an afternoon; the conversation history inside a paid community tier stays on the platform. That’s the mechanism behind July’s launch — Community’s real function is making more of a creator’s audience relationship non-portable.

Why a newsletter tool is building a chat room

A newsletter, structurally, is a list — the entire relationship lives in an email address a creator could export and take to a competitor tomorrow. That portability is the whole pitch newsletter platforms make to attract creators away from a rival, and it’s also the thing that keeps any single platform from ever fully owning a creator’s audience. A community feature works against that portability: conversations between subscribers, unlike the email list itself, don’t export. A creator can leave Beehiiv with their subscriber list intact; they can’t take the conversation history, the paid-tier chat access, or the relationships subscribers have built with each other. For a platform competing on retention, that’s close to the entire point of building Community in the first place.

The pitch is ownership, and at least one creator’s numbers back it up

Denk has framed Beehiiv’s difference from Substack and Patreon as being “unopinionated” about how a creator monetizes, rather than steering them toward one model. That pitch has a concrete data point behind it: journalist Frankie de la Cretaz reported a 78.4% increase in net income worth $21,325 a year after migrating a newsletter from Substack to Beehiiv, citing both financial and what they described as ethical reasons for the switch. That move isn’t an isolated case: Nieman Lab has tracked several other writers who left Substack for Ghost and Beehiiv and reported receiving a larger share of subscription revenue after the move. The company is betting that pattern continues — Beehiiv added 50,000 active users and posted its best quarter yet, $4.5 million in new annual recurring revenue, in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

What this means for anyone building an audience on borrowed infrastructure

Bloggers and newsletter writers building on any platform — Beehiiv, Substack, WordPress.com, YouTube — are making the same trade Beehiiv’s own creators are: portable reach in exchange for platform-specific engagement tools that don’t travel if they leave. The $1-million-a-month ad-network figure is early evidence that programmatic advertising can pay real money at scale without a creator selling a single sponsorship themselves, but that revenue is also the newest and least portable part of the arrangement — a sponsor relationship built through a platform’s ad network doesn’t move with an exported subscriber list the way the list itself does.

The useful question isn’t whether to use these tools; it’s tracking which parts of an audience are actually a creator’s to keep and which parts only exist because one specific platform is hosting them.

The retention math behind the community push

Beehiiv has spent the past year adding podcasts, webinars, and paywall options on top of newsletters — the podcasts feature hit its quarterly goal within 24 hours of launch and beat its Q2 target by more than 10x, according to Denk, and half of new podcast hosts on the platform migrated in from elsewhere. That kind of expansion only makes sense if the company expects creators to consolidate more of their business inside one platform rather than spreading it across specialized tools. Community is the piece of that stack least like the others: podcasts and webinars are content formats a creator could rebuild on a different platform, but a community’s value is the specific conversation history that formed inside it — the one part that doesn’t come along when a creator leaves.

The post Beehiiv just gave newsletter subscribers a way to talk to each other, and it’s a hedge against the one thing that makes newsletter platforms replaceable appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Min’s explanation was blunt: “Substack is an incredible launchpad, but we reached a point where it wasn’t built for what we were becoming.”

That is a specific, checkable complaint, and it is not the same complaint as “the rules keep changing under me.”

What actually left, and what didn’t

The Ankler’s departure wasn’t a clean break. The outlet said it would keep a weekly newsletter and live video presence on Substack even after moving its primary infrastructure to Passport — a hedge, not a divorce. That distinction matters, because the same caution applies to the other names attached to this story.

The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, and Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me have been reported as privately frustrated with Substack and quietly exploring alternatives, but none has announced a move.

Treating all four as already gone overstates what’s actually happened; only one has.

Why the math changes as a newsletter becomes a media company

Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue. On a solo newsletter earning $50,000 a year, that’s a rounding error. On an operation earning eight figures with a payroll to cover, it becomes real money fast: media reporter Oliver Darcy, writing in his Status newsletter and relayed by The Wrap, estimated the cut runs to “hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not north of a million each year” for top-tier outlets. Ten percent of The Ankler’s roughly $10 million in revenue lands right in that range. What’s driving the frustration is that a percentage that made sense when the business was one person and an email list stops making sense once the business has 18 salaries to fund.

What Substack is actually offering in return

Substack’s counter is that the fee buys distribution as well as infrastructure: the company says its discovery and recommendation tools drive roughly 30% of new paid subscriptions for creators on the platform. That’s a real number worth taking at face value. The publishers pushing back aren’t disputing it so much as arguing they’ve outgrown its value relative to its cost — they want customization, product control, and a design system that doesn’t make a seven-figure media brand feel like one of, as reporting has put it, the platform’s “sub-brands within its own ecosystem.”

The difference between this and a rules problem

It’s tempting to file this next to YouTube’s monetization-bar increase as another case of platform-dependent creators getting burned by rules changing underneath them. The reporting doesn’t support that comparison. Nothing here describes Substack changing its fee, its recommendation algorithm, or its terms unannounced. What’s described is a handful of publishers outgrowing a fee structure and a design ceiling that were built for a smaller kind of business than the ones they’ve become. That distinction — outgrowing a fee structure versus getting blindsided by one — is what determines whether your own platform risk looks like The Ankler’s or looks like YouTube’s.

Who this actually applies to

For the overwhelming majority of people writing on Substack, this fee fight changes nothing. A newsletter earning $50,000 or $200,000 a year is nowhere near the point where a 10% fee competes with payroll, and the platform’s discovery tools are still doing exactly the job they were built for at that scale. This is a top-of-the-market story about four publications that grew past being newsletters, not a warning sign for the thousands of writers who haven’t.

Ten percent of $10 million is roughly $1 million a year, the size of the line item that turned a platform fee from a rounding error into a decision. The Ankler is the only one of the four so far to act on it.

What this means for anyone building past a one-person operation

The lesson generalizes past media trades and Hollywood newsletters. Any blogger, YouTuber, or newsletter writer who starts as a one-person operation eventually faces the same fork The Ankler did: the platform fee, ad-network cut, or marketplace commission that was invisible at $50,000 a year becomes a line item worth renegotiating once there’s a staff to pay. The math here isn’t really about fairness — a 10% subscription cut, a 30% app-store fee, and a marketplace’s take rate are all defensible prices for the discovery and infrastructure they provide at small scale. What changes is leverage: a platform’s audience-finding tools matter less to someone who already has 150,000 people showing up directly, and that person can afford to pay more to own the relationship outright instead. The useful test isn’t “is this fee too high,” it’s “would I still need this platform’s discovery tools if my audience doubled” — and for most writers, the honest answer is yes, for a long time yet.

The post The Ankler didn’t leave Substack for a bigger audience – it left because the 10% cut that works at newsletter scale stops working at media-company scale appeared first on The Blog Herald.