Given the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not.

I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.

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graemep 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The articles does say

> The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead

It is about a particular type of directly profit making blog business model:

> The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Understood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword. All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.