Latest from Blog Herald

An AI company built specifically to replace vanishing local reporters in news deserts nationwide shut its entire operation down in 2026 after journalists discovered it had been copying, nearly word for word, stories those same reporters had already written

Less than one in three Google searches actually sends a visitor to someone else’s website anymore — here’s what that 2026 number means if your blog still lives on search traffic

In 2007, a 107-year-old Australian woman who could no longer type began dictating a blog about surviving two world wars and the Great Depression, and kept posting until two weeks before she died at 108

People who write in the same coffee shop every single day may not be creatures of habit — for some, the routine is what makes the blank page feel slightly less threatening

Premium Lite’s revenue split favors long-form 55/45 over Shorts — a ratio YouTube has reused, not invented, across its revenue systems

A 2026 study of search behavior found that 68 percent of Google searches now end without a single click, and small publishers lost 60 percent of their referral traffic in just two years.

News in the Blogosphere

An AI company built specifically to replace vanishing local reporters in news deserts nationwide shut its entire operation down in 2026 after journalists discovered it had been copying, nearly word for word, stories those same reporters had already written

A study of nearly 15,000 self-published Amazon books found that titles heavy with AI-generated content now make up a fifth of the catalog, but earn barely one in eight sales dollars.

Is blogging still profitable? The bloggers who reach a full-time income wait an average of four years to get there, and the wait is getting longer, not shorter

Virginia’s mandatory one-hour daily limit on teen social media use was struck down by a federal judge less than two months after it took effect, and NetChoice’s First Amendment win over Virginia’s usage caps could stall similar bills in other statehouses that would have limited how publishers reach younger audiences.

Blogging Tips & Guides

A national health survey found workers whose sleep shifted by more than 2 hours between weekdays and weekends were 50% more likely to rate their own health as poor, even though nothing about their actual diagnosis had changed

The liking gap turned out to be largest specifically in the shyest people studied, meaning the people most convinced they weren’t liked were also the same people whose own self-criticism was distorting the read in the first place

A 1988 study had one group of people write about their most traumatic experience for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, while another group spent the same four days writing about something completely ordinary, and when researchers measured their immune response afterward, the group who wrote about the hard thing came out with a measurably stronger one

People about to give a speech consistently believe their own nervousness is far more visible to the room than it actually is, a specific mismatch researchers gave its own name decades ago and the pattern keeps showing up

The Ideas Room

Bloggers past the 10-year mark earn more than double what 5-to-10-year bloggers make each month, but a 2025 survey of 187 bloggers found their revenue per pageview is actually lower

Writers who describe themselves as private people but still publish regularly aren’t always contradicting themselves — for some, publishing to strangers may feel far safer than sharing with the people who already have opinions about them

Volunteers left alone in a room with nothing to do for fifteen minutes, no phone allowed, rated it as unpleasant as a mild electric shock — and a close to half of them shocked themselves anyway

One food blogger watched her traffic fall from close to a million monthly pageviews to under 200,000 after Google’s AI Overviews started answering exactly the questions her posts were built to rank for, down to “how to cut a banana”