Here Are The 18 Niches Bloggers Are Most Likely to Abandon Blogs In

I run a large blog directory at FindABlog.Net. One of the features of the site is this page showing a list of abandoned blogs. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to go through this list and find out which niches were more likely to show up in this list of abandoned blogs. Below are my findings.

Executive Summary

Check out this chart for my results:I created this chart in August 2021. During that month there were a total of 150 abandoned blogs in FindABlog’s blog index. I have defined an abandoned blog as one where no new blog posts have been posted to the blog in the previous 24 months. Incidentally if you want to view the current list and make your own data feel free to do so. The list is here and for reference the list is sorted by the number of days since a comment was last posted on the blog. This way you should see blogs listed first where the author has stopped posting, but they are still approving comments (assuming they have to log into WordPress and manually approve them).

Disclaimer: at the time of writing FindABlog had indexed 14,605 blogs in various niches. There’s no guarantee that the index is evenly distributed around niches, although I have tried to keep the coverage as broad as possible. Incidentally FindABlog does not cover NSFW niches, and it tries to avoid indexing non-English language blogs.

Analysis of Results

I guess there’s no surprise in the blogging niches where abandoned blogs are most common. The top 3 niches for abandoned blogs are: travel, health and making money online. These are also arguably the 3 most popular niches for blogging.

Let’s look at some of the niches in more detail:

• Travel: This is a very popular niche. There are many travel bloggers and influencers who made a decent income from their travel blogs. Of course something happened in early 2020 that pretty much killed the travel industry stone dead, and with it went the legion of travel bloggers. As well as Covid-19, many travel bloggers simply stop posting when they stop travelling. For example, it’s really difficult to blog about Bali when you no longer live in Bali. Will travel blogs ever come back? Let us know your views in the comments section below.
• Health: This niche ought to be booming due to Covid-19, yet as you can see from my data this is the second most common niche for abandoned blogs. This niche is pretty tough. I abandoned my own health blog in 2011 because even back then it wasn’t easy to get traffic and I really hated the customers in this niche (they get REALLY angry if you do not deliver on their hopes and dreams). It’s unclear if a lot of health bloggers have given up due to the Google YMYL crackdown whereby they are penalizing sites (particular health related) that are not written by qualified authorities (such as actual doctors).
• Make Money Online: This is of course a really popular niche and it’s actually now my main niche. It’s difficult to blog in this niche and it’s likely that many bloggers simply give up after they have failed to make money online. For what it’s worth I’ve been in this niche since 2013 and I still don’t yet make a full time income from my sites. It’s a pretty difficult niche, and you can see that my YouTube channel gets very low views and subscribers, although I have done somewhat better with my SEO tools and other services.
• Corporate/B2B: I have lumped quite a few blogs in this category. They’re essentially mom and pop businesses, tyre shops, larger corporations etc.. I would say that many (most?) companies tend to be pretty bad at blogging. They go to a marketing seminar and somebody tells them about blogging so they get all enthusiastic about it for a few months, then stop posting and do something else instead.
• Personal Blog: I have put all the blogs about nothing (Seinfeld reference) into this category. As with corporate blogs, a lot of people think it’s cool to have a blog, but then lose interest when they find something else to do or it no longer has any meaning in their lives. I used to have a successful personal blog (receiving 10,000+ visitors a month) but it kind of died off when StackOverFlow stole my coding traffic, photosharing sites stole my photography traffic and travel bloggers stole my travel traffic. Maybe I should have improved my blog, but at the time I was making A LOT of money from my software business.
• Food: I thought this would be a higher placed niche but either food blogging is less popular than I thought or maybe food blogs are still the place to be in 2022. The good thing about the food niche is that there are vast numbers of long tail keywords, and it’s also a supremely AdSense (and other ad networks) safe niche.
• Relationships and Dating: I made A LOT of money from this niche from 2010 – 2015. It was a lucrative niche because it was easy to get traffic, plus people went click crazy on the adverts for online dating sites. As well as this, the affiliate income from promoting CPA offers was really good, with one offer paying me up to $90 per successful conversion! What happened? The shift to mobile dating apps made it more difficult to get conversions from traditional dating site offers. Traffic was also more difficult to obtain, plus there was a major geopolitical shift that killed off my best performing dating niche. As well as those factors, after writing something like 300 dating articles I simply could not think of anything more to say about the subject.
• Pets: This is of course a really big niche, with dog training being the infamous niche a lot of SEO experts used as their example niche. I thought there would be more abandoned pet blogs, but maybe it’s still a very good topic to blog about.
• Reviews: I lumped made-for-Amazon sites that review products and send visitors off to buy them at Amazon into this category. Not too many of the blogs have been abandoned. I thought there would be more of them given that it’s more difficult to get traffic and Amazon have slashed commission rates to as low as 1%. Despite this, HighPayingAffiliatePrograms.com believe the program is still worth sticking with.
• Cryptocurrencies: I am still convinced Bitcoin will go to $0 and then I expect we will see a surge in abandoned crypto blogs! But for now, the ponzi seems to be continuing.

Have you ever abandoned a blog? What niche was it in? Let us know in the comments below. You can also visit the page showing the list of abandoned blogs – you might even be able to buy a blog or two from the owners (this will probably be much cheaper than buying a blog through an online marketplace!).