This is the context for the pitch
I have now seen a draft of the schedule for the Renfrew Rotary Music Festival, which runs from April 23 to 25. Barring unexpected changes, I’ll be performing at 4:30 pm on Thursday the 24th at Trinity St. Andrews United Church. So if you’re at all curious about what I’ve been doing all this time at the piano, and you’re close enough or mad enough to make the trip, mark the date.
(I’m also providing piano accompaniment for a number of students during the vocals competition on Friday morning, but let’s leave that one for their parents and supporters, shall we?)
As for the pieces I’ll be playing, I have quite a bit to say, but I’ll save that for the next newsletter. Meanwhile:
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Blogonomics
(As part of The Map Room’s membership drive this month, I thought I’d write something about how the golden age of ad-supported blogging came to an end, and the challenge of doing what I’m doing in the current blogging landscape. This essay is cross-posted at my Patreon.)
Every so often I see someone on social media calling for the return of blogs, which for me sticks in the craw a bit because, you know, some of us never actually stopped. But I get what they mean: in the current environment of social media dopamine-farming, influencer grift and AI slop, the brief decade or so when blogging was the thing looks like the golden age of the internet.
But it’s worth examining why blogging isn’t a thing any more, why so many bloggers walked away from blogging, and why those of us who are crazy enough to keep at it struggle to keep going. Especially given that I’m in the middle of a membership drive for The Map Room, a blog about maps I’ve been writing, on and off, for 22 years next Monday.
There are, I think, three reasons why blogging faded away: (1) the collapse of our advertising revenue, (2) the disappearance of our audience, and (3) the enshittification of our tools.
It’s easy to forget just how transformative Google AdSense was to blogging when it launched in 2003. A system that automatically matched up a site’s content with ads on that topic, one that could run on small websites, was a game-changer. We could run ads without having to hustle for them or even think about them. And if you had enough of an audience, and that audience was valuable enough for advertisers to bid up the value of the ad inventory, you could make a little money. Matt Haughey found that his PVR blog made him enough money to pay his mortgage. At their peak, ads on The Map Room generated something like $400 a month—not a huge amount, but at a time when health issues made my participation in the workforce intermittent, it came very much in handy.
Before too long bloggers noticed that our ad revenues were dropping, and not by a little bit. One media blog reported that they needed twice as many page views to generate the same amount of ad revenue. By the time I went on hiatus in June 2011, my AdSense revenues had already dropped by half. The decline did not stop; it even continued when I restarted the blog in 2016. In 2020 average monthly ad revenue on The Map Room dropped below $10 a month. It’s improved since, but even compared to today I actually made more per month during the 2011-2015 hiatus, when The Map Room was in archive mode.
Several things were happening at once. At the time I thought the Great Recession had changed the ratio of advertisers to advertising spots: fewer advertisers, more bloggers, lower rates. But it was something more long term. In the wake of Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, ads shifted from matching ads to websites, which seemed innocuous (e.g., advertise maps on a map blog!), to matching ads to users. Website content no longer mattered: the ad followed the user across the web. And as ads got more intrusive and more obnoxious, users resorted to ad blockers, which led to sites blocking ad blockers, and so on and so on. At the same time, social media started hoovering up the ad revenue—as well as the audiences.
Because concomitant with the decline of our ad revenues was the departure of our audiences. Old bloggers lament the shutdown of Google Reader, a web-based RSS reader that made feeds accessible to the masses, but it was already in decline. (Fun fact: one of the biggest sources of The Map Room’s traffic back then was actually My Yahoo! At one point something like fifty thousand people subscribed to its feed via that portal.) People were moving en masse to social media, especially Facebook. Hobbyist forums and mailing lists withered in the face of Facebook Groups. People stopped surfing and started scrolling. In hindsight, the demise of Google Reader was a portent, not a cause.
Bloggers pivoted, or tried to. We created Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and linked our blogs to them so that they’d auto-post, in hopes that social media would send some traffic our way. Generally speaking, not so much. Twitter users kept scrolling by: at one point I noticed I was getting more traffic from Facebook even though I had three times as many Twitter followers. And then both sites started deprecating external links (and Instagram never supported them, hence “link in bio”).
It was an inversion of the original promise of the web, on which Google had built its entire business, once upon a time: sending you somewhere else. It was the original blogging ethos: here’s a link to something interesting. Instead, social media did everything it could to make you stay, trading dopamine hits for advertising eyeballs, hoovering up your attention, keeping you off the rest of the web.
The Map Room’s average monthly traffic is now about a tenth what it was at its peak 15-20 years ago. It’s been stable for years. About half comes from Google searches. Occasionally something I post hits Reddit and I get a huge influx of visitors for a couple of days, but otherwise there’s not much in the way of inbound links from other platforms.
At least I don’t think there is. I don’t have detailed access to site statistics any more, because JetPack detected ads on my site, and if I have ads I have to opt for a paid plan to get statistics. Automattic’s JetPack plugin, which brings a number of WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress sites, has been paywalling many of those features: what started out as free is now bundled in plans that actually cost more than my web hosting. (Auto-posting to social media was another such feature: I had to use other plugins and IFTTT recipes as workarounds, until IFTTT also enshittified itself.)
Meanwhile, it’s hard to find an RSS-to-email tool that isn’t part of a paid newsletter plan (since FeedBurner discontinued that feature I’ve been using my host’s email announcement service, but it’s labour-intensive and unreliable), and Facebook now wants you to pay up if you want even a handful of your followers to see your posts.
This is not to argue that companies shouldn’t make money, or that they should give me free things so that I can make more money. It’s that the end of the age of the free lunch has essentially eliminated a certain tier of customer for their services. Paid plans and licences are pitched at bigger operations than mine, while free services are predicated on blogs that don’t make any revenue at all. The blogging ecosystem no longer has any room for, or interest in, blogs that make pin money—which is what a lot of blogs in blogging’s heyday were. The midlist—between casual and corporate, making pay-the-mortgage money but not this-is-my-life-now money—has been evaporated.
One-tenth the traffic, one-tenth the income, and what was then free is now quite expensive. These are not conditions that will encourage a return to the golden age of blogging.
So it doesn’t surprise me that when I survey the current state of the blogosphere, and the map blogosphere in particular, I don’t see very many bloggers like me: i.e., independent enthusiasts who serve as a kind of informal news media. I mean, holy heck, Maps Mania is still a thing, but Keir and I, and maybe one or two others I’m forgetting right now, are the stubborn, stupid exceptions that prove the rule. Everyone else had to level up or go home, and most of them went home. Even map blogs that were part of a larger publishing concern—proper media—like Map Lab or the various map blogs Betsy Mason and Greg Miller wrote for National Geographic and Wired, have disappeared. I miss them all.
Nowadays most of the map blogs in my RSS reader fall into one of the following categories:
- Academics writing about their research
- Geospatial professionals writing about their work
- Artists, designers and mapmakers selling their wares
- Library, archive and museum blogs maintained by staff
In other words, the map blog is an adjunct to their day job, or a loss leader used to promote their career or business. This is mostly what’s left.
And here’s where I come to the point. There is no way for The Map Room to operate as a loss leader. I have no products to promote. If anything, it exists to bring attention to other people’s work: their books and maps and projects. And the writing gigs I might have leveraged from having it on the CV haven’t paid that much either. For it to continue, it has to pay its own way: its hosting bills, and ideally a little more than that so I don’t feel like a sucker working for free, and maybe so I can even upgrade the infrastructure a bit.
Advertising as it existed in the golden age of blogging was very nearly ideal, in hindsight. But it’s long since become invasive, obtrusive and ineffective; and to be meaningfully remunerative, it has to be very obtrusive. Relying too much on affiliate links risks compromising editorial integrity. Tip jars are too intermittent (to rely on one as a source, you have to shake it a lot, at the expense of what you’re shaking it for). Which leaves direct reader support, via subscriptions, as the best remaining option for a blog that does not operate as a loss leader for something else.
Hence the Patreon. Hence the membership drive. Because, to my surprise, and despite all the other demands on my limited time and energy, I find that I actually want to keep doing this, even 22 years on. And, if enough of my readers are kind enough and generous enough and able enough to support this project, I’ll be able to do so.
This isn’t the pitch. That’s over here. This is the context for the pitch, for those who might be interested in it and for whom it might make a difference.
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#links
- Katherine Martinko thinks there’s a flaking epidemic: people cancelling or noping out of invitations at the last minute on often flimsy or spurious grounds. I’d have dismissed this piece as another piece of solipsistic fappery (it happened to me = it’s a trend) that tends to turn up in the Lifestyles pages of the Globe and Mail, except that this sort of thing has happened to us more than once.
- The Atlantic on how kosher salt has taken over home kitchens (to the point where iodine deficiencies are starting to turn up again). “Unlike certain specialty salts, it doesn’t have unique properties by virtue of its provenance; it’s not collected from the coast of France or mined from a mountain in Pakistan. Kosher salt is just big salt.”
- A BBC Future report on how the reconstruction of Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral may have affected its acoustics.
- Rights to two of the three books by Angélica Gorodischer published in English translation by Small Beer Press have reverted to her estate (she died in 2022), with Trafalgar likely to be reverted in 2026. The bright side is that this seems to be part of the estate’s push to get more of her work published in English.