When Ads Stopped Working

René’s email hit at exactly the right moment. If you’ve been watching the advertising model implode, those numbers looked familiar: blog revenue from two grand a month down to two hundred. Not a reorganization. Not a pivot. A person living off savings while trying to keep something alive.

He’d been running Nerdcore, this German blog, on his own dime for years while working a day job. Keeping it alive because if he didn’t, a weird, thoughtful corner of the internet about geek culture would just disappear. That’s the situation for a lot of specific, niche writers now. Ad-supported blogs don’t survive anymore.

The reasons are obvious: Adblockers, YouTube, TikTok, all the platforms that pulled eyeballs away from the web. But the real casualty is quieter. Some corners of the internet—the ones that don’t trend, don’t algorithmically promote themselves, don’t scale—are just being deleted. Not because they’re bad, because they’re specific.

Nerdcore actually cares about what it writes. Not listicles, not viral content repackaged for the thousandth time, not whatever the algorithm wants. It’s geek culture written by someone who actually knows and loves it. Deep dives. Weird stuff. The kind of thing that only exists if someone decides it’s worth their time and money to keep alive.

There’s this unspoken deal that used to exist: parasites and good sites lived together under advertising, both making enough to exist. That deal broke. Adblockers and algorithmic scaling broke it. Now everything else has to choose: dumb down and sell out, or ask readers directly for money.

René picked the third thing. I don’t know if it works. But the alternative is that these things just disappear. And that’s what’s happening.