Latest from Blog Herald

beehiiv’s 2026 benchmark data shows a median newsletter converts well under one percent of free subscribers into paying ones, while Substack still discloses no comparable conversion figures of its own, a transparency gap that creators researching where to launch a new paid newsletter are only now starting to take seriously

AI answer boxes are reportedly wiping out a majority of organic search traffic for some blog categories in 2026 — while others have barely lost a visitor, and the split comes down to one thing

Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it

MLive announced in September 2026 that it will end print production entirely for eight of its Michigan newspapers, shifting those communities to digital only coverage after years of steadily declining print subscriptions across the whole state

Nota shut its eleven-site AI local news network in 2026 after journalists found their reporting copied without attribution, while the company’s separate publishing-tool business remained distinct from that failed experiment

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

News in the Blogosphere

beehiiv’s 2026 benchmark data shows a median newsletter converts well under one percent of free subscribers into paying ones, while Substack still discloses no comparable conversion figures of its own, a transparency gap that creators researching where to launch a new paid newsletter are only now starting to take seriously

MLive announced in September 2026 that it will end print production entirely for eight of its Michigan newspapers, shifting those communities to digital only coverage after years of steadily declining print subscriptions across the whole state

Nota shut its eleven-site AI local news network in 2026 after journalists found their reporting copied without attribution, while the company’s separate publishing-tool business remained distinct from that failed experiment

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.

Blogging Tips & Guides

There is a quality some writers have that makes readers trust them within a paragraph and almost none of them can explain what they are doing

Most people overestimate how fast blogging pays and underestimate how long the money can keep coming once a good post finds its audience

Everyone is telling you to start a Substack. Blog Herald has been covering this industry since 2003 — here’s what we actually think

A Substack writer with 20,000 subscribers laid out her seven-step growth framework. Here’s what it reveals about how the platform actually works in 2026

The Ideas Room

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

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

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”

53% of Gen Z say becoming a creator is a viable career and the industry that used to mock that idea is now paying attention