Latest from Blog Herald

The Ankler didn’t leave Substack for a bigger audience – it left because the 10% cut that works at newsletter scale stops working at media-company scale

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.

Podcast advertising rates are climbing and YouTube just doubled its monetization bar – here’s why that might not be a coincidence

Arkansas’s own Democrat-Gazette is among nearly 400 local newspapers now suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims their articles were scraped without permission to train ChatGPT and Copilot, and the case could set the terms for whether smaller blogs and digital publishers ever get compensated when their content trains someone else’s AI.

Why studios chasing spec deals with digital creators are really just buying an audience-acquisition cost they can no longer justify building from scratch

New York’s SAFE Act now blocks algorithmic feeds and overnight notifications for any user a platform believes is under 18, and the rules Governor Hochul’s office finalized this summer could quietly reshape how blogs and digital publishers reach teen readers who discover content through social recommendations rather than search.

News in the Blogosphere

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.

Podcast advertising rates are climbing and YouTube just doubled its monetization bar – here’s why that might not be a coincidence

Arkansas’s own Democrat-Gazette is among nearly 400 local newspapers now suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims their articles were scraped without permission to train ChatGPT and Copilot, and the case could set the terms for whether smaller blogs and digital publishers ever get compensated when their content trains someone else’s AI.

New York’s SAFE Act now blocks algorithmic feeds and overnight notifications for any user a platform believes is under 18, and the rules Governor Hochul’s office finalized this summer could quietly reshape how blogs and digital publishers reach teen readers who discover content through social recommendations rather than search.

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

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”

Fold a single dollar bill in half fifty-one times, not fifty, and the stack would be thick enough to pass the Sun — exponential growth breaks intuition long before it breaks arithmetic

Sleep science says the pilot who nodded off for 28 minutes at cruising altitude wasn’t being careless — he was legally “rested” by every rule on the books, and fell asleep anyway, because duty-time regulations count hours off, not hours actually spent recovering