A few months ago, I wrote an email with the subject line, “The BEST kind of infotainment, for me, now.”
In that email, I said the kind of infotaining content that’s working best for me now is not not funny stories… nor personal reveals… nor pop culture references… nor rants and raves.
Instead, the best kind of infotainment for me now is “What’s working for me now,” and its flip side, “What’s not working for me any more.”
After I wrote that email, there was some chatter in other newsletters to the effect of, “Yeah but that’s because John writes to an audience of sophisticated marketers and marketing-savvy biz owners. The same is NOT true for the vast majority of other niches.”
Well, about that.
Yesterday I saw a post titled “The Great Blogging Collapse” by a guy named Daniel Stanica.
Stanica did some research.
Back in 2022, he took a look at 100 money-making blogs, spanning fields like blogging, recipes, travel, DIY, parenting, health.
Today, in 2026, Stanica looked at those same 100 blogs again. Did they grow, shrink, or disappear?
And yes, before you raise your hand, his post is mainly about blogging and about success as measured by SEO traffic.
Still, the conclusions he reached in comparing 100 successful online properties in 2022 and 2026 sound reasonable to me, and align very much with what I said above.
So what happened to the 100 successful 2022 blogs in 2026?
According to Stanica:
1. “The median successful blog lost 85% of its Google search traffic.”
2. “More than half of the blogs experienced catastrophic declines.”
At the same time, a small number of blogs maintained or became more successful. Looking at the commonalities among them, Stanica sums it up in four points:
1. Firsthand experience (“I made/tested/went”)
2. Owned audience
3. Real product
4. Brand search (people search for your name)
To me, that first point, about firsthand experience, sounds exactly like what I talked about when said “what’s working for me now.”
Combine that with the remaining 3 points, and it pretty much sums up what I’ve found to work and what I do with this newsletter.
It’s something that worked in 2016… that’s working in 2026… and that is highly likely to work still in 2036, even with the development of AI… and the great blog collapse… and the impending shortage of sulfur in the world.
If you’d like to find out more about how I and a small group of forward-thinking marketers and business owners are surviving and even thriving in 2026, and probably 2036: