Every few years, someone announces that blogging is dead. It’s been Reddit’s favorite take since at least 2012. And every time, it quietly gets proven wrong.
The latest version of this argument has AI search as the villain. Google buries organic results under AI overviews. People ask Claude instead of searching. Traditional publishing, the argument goes, has finally run out of road.
I don’t buy it. And the numbers back me up.
83% of internet users (roughly 4.44 billion people) still read blog posts according to Master Blogging,
77% of internet users read blogs regularly, and 70% prefer them over ads when they want to learn about a brand says Best Writing. That’s not a dying medium. That’s one of the most persistent reading habits on the internet.
Part of what keeps blogging alive is something AI can’t easily replicate: the feeling that a real person wrote it.
Human tone outperforms corporate tone in reader engagement by a factor of three says Marketing LTB.
People follow specific writers, specific voices, specific takes. Not just topics. That’s the thing the “blogging is dead” crowd keeps missing. They’re measuring page views, not loyalty.
I’ll be honest. Even I’ve shifted. My daily use of Claude now covers things I used to search for. But I still find myself reading real blogs. Human ones.
The kind where someone’s working through a thought, not just answering a query. That’s a different thing entirely, and I don’t think it goes away.
What I’m Planning
My current trajectory is already a mixed bag: Content, SaaS products, experiments under Ryoka. Adding a blog network on top of that sounds like a lot. Maybe it is.
But the timeline I’m working with is three to five years minimum, and if it gets unwieldy, I’ll hire or bring someone on to handle the legwork.
The plan, roughly:
- Deploy 10 to 20 small niche blogs
- Start each with a baseline of three pieces of content, add one per month
- Evergreen only. Content that doesn’t expire and doesn’t need constant attention
- Rotate through them, building enough content layers that they can support Ryoka and its portfolio over time
The niches aren’t fully determined yet. But the approach is: pick industries adjacent to what I’m already building, and let the blogs do slow, compounding work in the background.
What I’m Expecting
Zero, honestly. Not in a pessimistic way, but in a realistic one.
I’m not building this for quick wins. I want a publishing network that quietly supports the brands I’m building and adds another layer of credibility to Ryoka as a permanent capital company.
The more owned assets I have (small or large), the stronger the foundation. That’s the whole logic of permanent capital thinking: you don’t exit, you accumulate.
The concrete targets I’m aiming at:
- 100 to 150 monthly visitors per blog as a baseline
- Traffic that promotes my own products at the right moment. A blog about building in public feeding into Sorano, a productivity blog feeding into TWO Docs
- Higher conversion rates because the readers already trust the content
- Lower cost per acquisition over time, because organic compounds and paid doesn’t
And at $10 a year per domain, the cost floor is almost nothing. The real input is time and attention. Both of which can be systematized once the content rhythm is established.
The Longer Reason
I remember when paper became a luxury item. Something you chose deliberately rather than defaulted to. It didn’t disappear, it just repositioned. I think something similar might happen with human-written content. Not extinction, but scarcity value.
If AI-generated text keeps flooding the web, and 7.5 million blog posts are published every day as of 2025, then the ones that clearly come from a real person with a real perspective are going to stand out more, not less.
That’s the version of the future I’m building toward.
And even if I’m wrong about that, the asset value holds. I, Pieter Borremans building a network of niche blogs that support micro-acquisitions through Ryoka isn’t contingent on blogging having a cultural moment.
It’s just a low-cost, compounding bet with a long horizon and a sensible floor. That’s the kind of thing I can live with.
