1. Bloggers Will Increasingly Be Recognized as Digital Publishing Businesses

Many successful bloggers don’t think of themselves as a blogger. They consider themselves digital content publishers, or some other similar type of small online business. And this is realistically a much better description for most of these companies.

First, most blogs that generate full time income are actually run by a small team of people (more like a tech startup, but with a proven market and relatively quick cash flow).

They have a formal blog business plan, which guides much of their content creation and provides structure to their writing.

These companies may have full time staff or a series of countless freelancers. Either way, they are major sources of employment.

Second, most blogging businesses extend beyond written content. Many bloggers have realized that there is a lot of synergy with video or audio content, and have begun to launch YouTube Channels, Podcasts, Online Courses, and self guided info products.

These businesses are much more a small digital media or entertainment business than just an individual writer, publishing their thoughts.

Third, many of the most successful bloggers are expanding their empires by building a wide range of niche blogs, aimed at generating stable cash flow and consistently selling at high valuations.

I personally have over 10 active websites (which are each monetized in some way) and all function as independent brands. Larger players may operate dozens of sites which produce content at an astounding rate.

I know content publishers who consistently publish over 1,000 full length posts of written content per month! These companies have full time employees managing their workflow, and hundreds of writers, editors, and virtual assistants helping publish the final content. These teams often publish across multiple platforms, meaning they are also producing hundreds of videos or numerous podcast episodes.

2. Financialization of Blogging

The flow of content available on the internet has been transformed by global capital markets and new investment in the blogging space.

When a website becomes profitable, it has the potential to become saleable. Websites have been bought and sold as investments for years. However, it is only more recently that larger investors have begun investing in sites, and ultimately purchasing them, regardless of their size.

When I first started creating online businesses over 10 years ago, it was hard to sell an online business for a monthly multiple of more than 10x-15x. It was simply viewed as too volatile. And even if someone did want to buy your digital asset, there was very little demand for high dollar sales, even at a generous valuation for the buyer.

Today, companies like Motion Invest act as a private equity firm, directly buying blog and other digital assets that produce income. As they note on their own site, sites sold through Motion Invest sell for an average multiple of 35x (that is 35 times monthly profit), or nearly the equivalent of three years profit.

And these valuations continue to rise every year. It is not uncommon to see established sites sell for 40x-50x multiples. And it’s easy to see why.

Compared to a more traditional investment, like real estate, an income producing blog has a much higher ROI, and the payback period is much shorter.

For example, if you were to compare buying a blog as an investment to buying a piece of commercial real estate, a fast food franchise, or a self storage facility, the fact that you could recoup 100% of your investment with a blog/niche content site within 2-3 years seems like a tremendous opportunity compared to the 7-15 year average return needed by the more traditional investments.

Obviously there are plenty of unique risks depending on how your site is monetized, but in general, any asset with an extremely high ROI will eventually attract the attention of investors.

The other factor that could spur website valuations up further is the introduction of financing. Currently, almost all blog purchases are made in cash (meaning the buyer pays the seller the full amount of the agreed upon sale price upon closing escrow).

But as blogs and income producing sites become more mainstream, and really a financial product themselves, buyers will begin to be able to access capital to purchase these sites through lower interest rate lenders.

3. It Will Be Increasingly Challenging to Start and Build a Niche Site Quickly

Currently, if you are a decent writer who understands keyword research, SEO, and can operate a simple WordPress website, you can build a blog that generates decent income ($500+ per month) in under two years.

More experienced bloggers who use expired domains, or already have spent time finding cost effective writers, can make a full time income ($5,000 per month) during this same two year period.

While it can be grueling work to build your first income producing blog, the dream is still alive and well. But as Google has to deal with more and more AI and programmatic content, as well as a steady stream of new bloggers, it is likely that the initial period where you need to produce content and wait for Google to index and rank your early content (sometimes referred to as the Google Sandbox) will become longer or require higher quality content.

Right now this period is typically 4-12 months for a brand new blog. But as a way of combating a huge wave of new content, it is easy for me to imagine Google effectively making this period longer, with perhaps more stringent oversights.

4. Site Growth Will Increasingly Involve New Site Aquisitions

Today, for most bloggers, the best way to grow your site it to produce high quality content at scale. This can be done by writing every article yourself or by outsourcing the entire writing process.

But as blogs become increasingly recognized for their income generating potential and Google looks to stifle the growth of AI generated content, it is easy to imagine even more domain authority being conferred to existing authority sites.

This could lead to new or existing site owners choosing to buy or acquire rival sites that have already established trust with Google, rather than spending a lot of money and time creating rival content for a relatively new site.

5.  For Long Term Survival, Sites will Need More Income Sources

Right now, there are a few distinct strategies for monetizing your blog. You can:

• Build an “information site” which generates substantial traffic, and is monetized through various levels of premium ad networks.
• Build an affiliate site which means that you target content relevant to buyers (such as product reviews) and you earn a commision for sales of these products that originate from your website.
• Build a private online community (could be a forum, Substack newsletter, member funded project through Patreon, etc.) where people pay to access premium content or community discussions.
• Build a blog (typically alongside requisite cosial media platforms) allowing you to promote products, trends, or services through brand sponsorships or other sponsored content.

Many blogs already rely upon multiple income streams, but as Google phases out cookies (potentially affecting display ad rates) and larger affiliate programs like Aamzon slash their affiliate commission rates (which they have already done several times), content publishers will likely need to find a mixture of income streams to generate high levels of income or offer very high margin products that they promote as part of their own eCommerce store/brand.

For some blogs this is a pretty natural transition (for example, a fashion blogger could launch a physical product in partnership with a brand, a travel blogger might sell eBooks going into deeper detail on hotspot tourist destinations, or a tech blogger might create software that users can pay for subscription access to). However, for many blogs, this will mean they need to develop a very strong relationship with their audience, and perhaps adjust their strategy based on what their readers may want.

6. Blogs Will Generally Require Better and More Frequent Content

Five years ago, bloggers could write a series of 10-30 average quality posts and rank for their target keywords in many niches. Today, most bloggers know they need to publish better content and more of it.

As a general rule of thumb, when I’m seeding a brand new website with content, I try to aim for 50-70 blog posts. This seems to be the minimum of high quality (and highly related) blog posts needed to begin to get significant traction and data from search engines.

This may sound daunting at first, but it is also a function of how fast you create and publish these posts.

If you publish just one blog post per week, you’ll reach this threshold in about a year. If you publish daily blog posts, we are looking at more like 2-3 months.

To be clear, these are numbers of posts recommended to get a blog started. Once you gain some traction to your blog, you can likely post far less, and you will continue to see strong growth over time.

But the content velocity of those initial number of posts seems to have increased substantially, and I see this trend continuing.

7. High Quality Content Will Require Multiple Forms of Content

Currently, when I refer to high quality blog posts, I am primarily taking about well written, insightful, and original posts that cover a topic thoroughly.

However, in the next few years, I think that high quality posts will require more than just this amazing written content.

Visual content (custom images, infographics, videos) will become essential to any blog post.

I believe this in part because there is increasing demand for video content in general across the internet but also because visual content conveys a sense of trust and authority to content creators (and this may be explicitly be reinforced by Google updating its E-E-A-T Guidelines to include “experience” to build trust with consumers).

This is not to say every post will require its own video, rather, I think publishers might need to focus on having some piece of completely original content in each post (and if they don’t have that, consider consolidating or editing old posts and improving the overall user experience of their readers).