Reflections on six years of blogging.
Sometimes time flies by and you miss things. I missed that the fifth anniversary of the blog came and went on the 18th of May 2023, over a year ago. Six years is a long time, and I wanted to take a step back and indulge in some retrospection and introspection, about the blog and how I see it going forward. In the past six years I moved twice, graduated university, moved back to Sweden, have had two different jobs, got my own apartment, and done countless other things big and small, important and not. The blog has been a somewhat fixed point in that, especially since 2022 when I started to stick to my goal of posting a blog post every week. I’m not always happy with the way the posts turn out, indeed sometimes the posts have been posted only to keep the streak alive, but I have also managed some writing I am genuinely proud of. A Tale of Two Scandals, The Definition of Insanity, and especially The Default Dance comes to mind as posts where my writing was clear and my points well made. Compared to the early posts like The Iran Deal and Multipolarity it is encouraging to see how the years of writing has resulted in some increased skill. While I’m taking a victory lap, I’m also proud to say that I find some of my old analysis to be quite sharp. Andrew Tate, TikTok, and the Content Economy makes some points I haven’t really seen elsewhere in regards to how TikTok’s ad model works, The Search for a Tech Shortcut I think provides a good model for understanding why people like Elon Musk and technologies like AI are so revered, and Why Putin Won’t Be Ousted has proven to be dead on so far. There have also been less successful posts – in terms of both the points made and the writing meant to make those points – but I have decided that I won’t delete any posts as they are valuable both as a reminder of what I used to think and as an inspirational tale of how everyone – even small bloggers no one has ever heard of – have to start from somewhere.
When I first started this blog, I had the misguided idea that it might one day prove profitable. Perhaps even a full-time job. Citizen journalists and talking heads are so common on social media, why couldn’t I find an audience and make it big on the internet? Well, maybe not big, but at least medium-sized enough to make a few hundred euros a month or year. I’m older now, and perhaps even wiser, and I have come to terms with the realisation that the age of the blog was dead and buried when I started, and it won’t be coming back anytime soon. There’s a certain freedom to obscurity, a license to experiment as there is no winning formula or perfect track record to ruin. As the years have gone by I have revised my view on the desirability of an internet career.
Would I like to write full time? Sure, but the reality of the internet writing business is not one I’d envisaged for myself. As far as I can tell, there are broadly three ways to make a full time living off a blog: SEO maximisation, Patreon, and advertising. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the proven method of orienting all your ostensibly creative work towards ranking highly on search engines to get as much traffic, and by extension ad revenue as possible. It’s just the least fun you can have with a blog, and boils down to focus testing everything you write with Google instead of with real people. If you ever search for blogging advice this is what you get: endless articles about backlinks, evergreen “content”, and researching niches where you can rank high on Bing. SEO is a method for bringing in money via making a useful reference guide, indeed most people who I have seen talking about how much money their blog makes runs a website about some semi-niche interests where they can write guides like taking care or pet axolotls or fixing up vintage motorbikes. SEO is the antithesis of what I want Ipoleco to be. The blog is a collection of essays and commentaries on all manner of social science topics and I can never dream to be considered an authority on economics or international relations in Google’s eyes.
The second option is to rely on Patreon, or similar voluntary donation funding models. Maybe this is me being proud, but I don’t want to rely on the generosity of strangers for my livelihood. Of course, there are paywalls and other systems where the exchange is more equal than straight up donations, but as long as people are not paying for what I have written, but rather for what I will write and am currently writing it feels wrong to get people’s money for it. On YouTube channels and podcasts people whose work is funded through Patreon often say something along the lines of “just one dollar a month helps”, or “for the price a coffee you can support my work” and I respect the independence that many small streams of income can bring. At the same time though, you are beholden to your base of patrons who could force you into making what they want instead of what you want. How much of a risk that really is I don’t know, and besides I certainly don’t have a readership large enough to make a Patreon a viable source of revenue: but ultimately I wouldn’t want to even if I could.
Finally, advertising is a common and no doubt viable alternative for anyone who manages to attract traffic. Obviously, the first problem with this model for Ipoleco is that the site gets about a dozen unique visitors per month, hardly enough to monetise. Besides, I’m often critical of the advertising industry on the blog and personally hate having advertising be a part of creative work, on the internet and off the internet. It’s also just so tacky to hawk the latest fad product from some company no one has ever heard of complete with ostensibly personal recommendations and assertions that the person used the product even before they were sponsored, they promise!
I have had a lot of fun working on the blog, and it has been a very fulfilling hobby for the past six years, I have no intentions to quit even if it is destined to remain a hobby rather than a career. It has also made me a much better writer to the point that I want to tackle more ambitious writing projects. As I wrote on the ‘About’ page, I am now in the process of writing a long form project tentatively called ‘The Bird and The Technoking’ where I explore Elon Musk’s purchase and subsequent management of Twitter, and the broader questions of how social media does and should work. I have no current timeline for completion, but at the time of writing I have just started working on part five of five, not counting the introduction or the conclusion. The aim is for it to total some 30-35 thousand words, equal to about 100-117 pages, but I won’t know for sure until I am finished. The hope is to submit it for publishing, but it remains to be seen whether any publisher will be interested, if not I hope to make a podcast series out of it and of course post it on the blog.
Sincerely thank you for reading whether this is the first and only post of mine you’ve read or if you’ve read every one since the start. I’ll return with a more typical post next Monday.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about Trump here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Natasha Granqvist
Congratulations on this hefty milestone! The quality and consistency of your writing here is inspiring. Can't wait for the book. /Lawrence