Read This...Please

An update on what's been happening

Greetings, friends!

I’m rearranging the furniture once again, and I’m letting you know not to stub your toes on the coffee table. I’ve moved several of my web properties from Ghost hosting to Medium. On top of that, I’ve restarted this Substack newsletter for informational purposes. So, why all the rearranging?

Simple. I’ve thrown in the towel with blogging.

It pains me to say this, as someone who’s maintained several self-hosted blogs since 2006, but my web properties have slowly drifted into obscurity, particularly after this year’s Google update. After researching and evaluating the situation, I realized I no longer have a strong enough web presence to sustain self-hosted sites like thomasott.io and neuralmarkettrends.com.

Back in the wild days of the Internet, I managed to rank on the first page of Google for years. Then came the siloing of the web, and traffic to neuralmarkettrends.com plummeted. Adding to this, I started working at an exciting startup, and my time for blogging became very limited.

Despite my limited time, my blog continued to wither. Frankly, I didn’t worry much because I was (and still am) living my best life. Since 2014, I’ve built an amazing career, and it’s only getting better. However, the nagging question of what to do with my blog kept creeping up at the most inconvenient times. I flip-flopped between shutting the entire site down or restarting it. Eventually, I decided to give Neural Market Trends another shot, this time on the Ghost platform.

Now, well over a year into that experiment, and in light of Google’s updates, I’ve concluded that the experiment was an abject failure. The same goes for my thomasott.io site. My technology/startup/machine learning publication on Ghost saw zero engagement. Despite pouring my heart into writing there, Google sent no visitors my way.

It was demoralizing, to say the least.

So, I did what any frustrated writer would do—I moved my properties. I figured if you can’t beat ‘em… join ‘em. And that’s exactly what I did.

I migrated neuralmarkettrends.com to Medium and thomasott.io to Substack. At the start of the year, I had already done this with Weathered, moving away from Ghost and back to Medium. I reposted an article that got boosted, and my Weathered publication was back on the map.

While Medium and Substack have different monetization models, they both offer something I want and need: an engagement algorithm. My articles and posts are now in front of people who come to these hubs specifically for information and news.

The gist of it

After over a decade of self-hosted blogging, I’ve decided to move away from traditional blogging platforms like Ghost due to dwindling web traffic, especially after recent Google algorithm updates.

Despite my best efforts to revive my sites, I couldn’t get it done.

So welcome to a new Neural Market Trends and From The Desk of Thomas Ott sites. I look forward to interacting with you there.

Best,

T