There’s an article from Guitar World many years ago which has stayed with me all this time. It asked whether readers would be as dedicated to practising, if any chance of playing to a live audience was taken away.
At the time, I practised guitar daily, and could never imagine that would change. But over the years there have been times when I’ve gone weeks or months between picking up an instrument. Part of it was due to work and life commitments, but a larger part was the fact I haven’t been in a band for years.
I’ve never been a skilled or virtuoso guitar player (I’d say I’m workmanlike at best), so being on stage in a group was a massive part of the motivation for me to spend hours on scales, learning new songs and making sure I wouldn’t mess up too badly.
At the same time, I’ve written and published some type of article online pretty much every day for 20 years. Much of it was professional work for employers or clients, but alongside that has always been blogging and other side projects.
My personal projects have rarely been set up as focused, profitable business ventures. Generally they’ve been opportunities for me to write about things I care about, and potentially grow an audience and a small income stream over time. And while they’ve never made much money, a surprisingly large number of people have visited them over the years.
But recently, that’s all changed.
Even before the rise of inescapable AI, Google’s regular algorithm updates results in demoting a lot of small sites and blogs. And then came AI overviews and search tools cutting traffic overnight as Google went from organising the world’s information to simply republishing it all themselves without permission or financial compensation.
I don’t think any search engine owes me rankings or traffic, and my advice has always been to diversify where your audience comes from. You should never rely on a third party business being nice enough to publicise you for free, whether that’s a search engine, social network or anywhere else.
But when I’m focused on ensuring client sites have multiple, sustainable sources of business whatever happens, it means I don’t have much time left to spend on my own projects. Especially when they were always primarily about the writing. I grew up loving books, magazines, comics and fanzines, and my sites were the result of wanting to create my own versions.
Putting aside the debates about AI, search engines and whether I could pivot to video, creating NFTs or selling products, I come back to the original question.
Will I still write as much if no-one comes to read it? Or even find it?
The honest answer is that at the moment I don’t know. With client work, there’s still a need for human input to create articles that work for SEO, which still effectively powers AI results. But writing for side projects purely for fun and the possibility that it might pay off financially or otherwise at some point?
It’d be nice to think I’ll keep going no matter what, because of my love of the art of writing. But part of what first attracted me wasn’t the ink on a page – it was the impact that the right words or phrases could have on someone reading them. And I’m still fascinated by how everything from an advertising slogan to a novel can stay with someone for life, inspire them to turn their world upside down, or spend their money on something they never needed until now.
And I know I’m not the only person wondering whether they’ll be writing as much, or at all, in the future. Which raises all kinds of questions about creativity, information, bias and accessibility if all those voices go quiet. Even if it does mean I might have more time to pick up a guitar again…
Image by Jean-Jacques Halans via Unsplash
