I run a news website, and it's freaking hard

For being fast and cautious, Google rewards you with a strike

I run Spiel Times. A blog I started back in 2015 when I was a 14 yo kid who loved video games. I wrote about games after school, and it reached a few hundred people in some corners of the world. Now, it’s a blend of almost everything from pop to celebrities, games to movies, sports to social media f*ups. Trust me, it wasn’t my intention.

With skyrocketing prices of commodities and the lifestyle of a recent adult, it’s hard to meet ends. Google pays you around $1-2 per 1,000 views, and to get views, you need a lot of articles. Why a lot? Because only a few of them will work, others, not so much.

Most of what we do at Spiel is repackage what’s already on the internet with a pinch of our perspective. Isn’t that something anyone could do if they just rest their fingers on the keyboard? I believe so. But it gets much worse than that.

Competition is huge with hundreds of blogs and websites covering the same thing, sometimes faster than those multimillion dollar news companies. But the latter gets the fruit, the money, and the eyeballs, because of their reputation. Google seldom ranks the niche websites, even if they break the news. Maybe they want people to read from a proven and reliable source? I don’t know.

We used to accept sponsored articles but sometimes these companies don’t want to disclose that they were advertising. That felt wrong after some time too. You’re misleading your audience into believing an ad is not an ad. We included sponsored tags whenever possible, but we’ve slowed down on sponsored articles since then.

Ad revenue is bad, and moreover, with Google’s September Helpful Content Update, we were f*d big time. The algorithm slapped Manual Actions on thousands of websites, deranking articles, and even throwing out many websites from Google Search altogether.

That’s a lot to digest, but in easy words, your business stops earning money.

Layoffs, budget cuts, and even trying all sorts of things became a daily routine till our website finally got rid of the Manual Action in April-end. The site, however, is still not reaching as many people as we used to earlier.

At our peak in July, we reached over 2.5 million people across the world, earning us over $5,000 from ads alone. My birthday is on the 13th of July, and that was a pleasant surprise. I even organized a charity event gifting scholarships to two bright talents from my hometown. But then, everything went downhill.

Now, we’re just the founding members, 3, writing whatever we can, in hopes we’ll reach our glorious 50,000-views-per-day streak someday soon.

The story’s a lot bigger than this, but you get the gist.

Now, all I think about is if I should put my writing skills into better use by joining some publishing company, or writing a book myself. I don’t read much, so it’d be unfair to publish garbage in the form of a book. A lot’s out there anyway.

Let’s see how things work out.