Eight months chasing a mirage

■ Looking back at my first attempt to build a blog as a business (part 1). How I hoped to make some money with it, before realising that the time for this sort of commercial venture had passed.

October 2025

For several weeks, I could feel the pressure building.

I had just poured eight months, flat out, into a blog. I invested into the software that lets me produce or promote content, and into a new laptop.

I’m married and work full-time as a graphic designer. Pay in this field is modest, and I’ve long wanted to change careers. But going back to study has always put me off: after exhausting days, I don’t have the energy. Full-time study is out of the question: there’s the mortgage and the bills to pay.

Early in 2025, I had two options: either take an online course in my spare time and start a new career from scratch, or make a more natural transition from my job to running a monetized blog, hoping to earn a supplemental income quickly.

I chose the second path.

Launched with a lot of enthusiasm, the project ate up all my free time. On a few occasions, I told my wife I’d soon be earning a little extra. First I needed three months to build a base, then four, then five. I was finally adding affiliate links and had published an ebook, the first in a series.

I still wasn’t earning anything, and the pressure kept rising. Six months, then seven. With my day job, that meant 10–14 hours a day, weekends included. My side hustle had become a relentless hamster wheel.

While countless YouTube influencers were selling the dream of getting rich through blogging, the research I was doing for my articles was painting a very different picture of the blogging landscape.

Google’s introduction of AI answers had changed the game.

I could see it in my own habits: I was using AI for everything and visiting almost no blogs. Some strategies could, in theory, adapt to this shift, but they were limited. And OpenAI’s recent Atlas launch reinforced that impression. The future pointed toward ever tighter integration between consumers and AI, in a world where AI becomes the primary, even sole, interface.

Without Google, almost everything rests on social networks. But I couldn’t find the time needed to promote my blog. The common advice was 80 percent promotion to 20 percent writing, with roughly one post a week. I could barely do the opposite.

My research also suggested it takes, on average, two years for a blog to bring in any income at all, even a modest amount, and twice that to reach a full-time income. And there are no guarantees. Worse, those figures dated back from 2024, before Google’s new constraints are fully accounted for.

Commercial blogging is a speculative venture where the main resource is the time you invest. And investing four years or more before earning a salary may be conceivable at twenty, but much less at my age.

Now imagine spending two years studying, with a degree at the end. If you choose a reasonably paid profession, you could be earning about $70,000 a year, or more. What are the chances of getting that online after two years?

So last week I decided to call it, and I started new studies in WHS.

That said, I like blogging and will continue. I just don’t need to worry so much about the commercial angle.

All in all, I feel relieved. The pressure is gone and I’ve got my life back. Blogging is great, but be warned if you’re looking at doing the same: chasing the mirage of success and financial independence can consume a lot of time and, in the end, feel surprisingly hollow.

It’s not all bad news. In the months that followed, the skills I had acquired led me to compose my first album, and set up a couple of YouTube websites. By contrast, I no longer expect too much from these projects, but I sincerely enjoy working on them.