Building a blog biz: "I think that there's just something unique about the written form."

Ernie Smith, founder of the newsletter and blog Tedium, is anything but tedious. He shares a bit of what he's learned in 15 years of indie internet publishing.

Woman Reading in the Studio, c. 1868, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Hello, and welcome to the Content Audit, the newsletter about blogs¹.

Ernie Smith has been writing online for 15 years, and publishing independently for most of that time.

From 2009 to 2014, he built and edited ShortFormBlog, an acclaimed² indie news site on Tumblr that told stories with numbers and graphics. When he stopped publishing in 2014, he had over 150,000 followers.

Next he rejected the news cycle and the platform with Tedium, a long-form publication, sent as a newsletter and co-published as a blog, that delved into the history of whatever interested him. Nine years later, he has written hundreds of deep dives and become something of an elder statesman of indie internet publishing. We talked about Tedium and the blog business.

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LOGAN SACHON, THE CONTENT AUDIT: You were invited to move to Substack early on, and declined. 

ERNIE SMITH, TEDIUM: With Substack, I was like, “I think what you’re doing is interesting, but I’m not jumping to another platform.” I’d become a very strongly anti-platform guy. I want to own as much of my stack as possible. 

But then you did launch a little side Subsatck. 

For a few months, yeah. Once Substack started up this social network thing, I thought, I don’t necessarily like it, but I also don’t know how big it’s going to be. I saw Substack as this node, and I wanted to build a bridge out of the node to the newsletter that I actually care about. So I built this little newsletter on Substack called Lesser Tedium that was essentially old Tedium issues that I shortened. And I did it for about three months, and when it didn't set the world ablaze, I stopped.

Basically an audience growth test. I’ve been struck by how you just try stuff out, like MidRange.

Midrange was a project to make sure I wasn't letting my short-writing muscle atrophy. I gave myself a 30-minute timer and wrote quick-hit pieces on whatever interested me that day. And I think it was a good idea, but at some point, I felt like it was running into this trap of being about Elon Musk all the time.

But after MidRange and Lesser Tedium, I decided to switch up the Tedium format. So rather than two long pieces a week, which is what I used to do, I do two shorter pieces and a longer piece.

How is Tedium monetized? 

I’ve taken a lot of approaches over the years. I've never done subscriptions, but I’ve been doing Patreon since 2016 or 2017. For a while, it was something I put more effort into. Now my approach is more, if you want to support me, you can. It's consistent. It's not massive, but it pays for hosting, and it makes sure that I can continue to do some research—digging through 100-year-old newspapers, you need to be able to pay for that.

I do sponsorships and ads, some automated, some actually setting up deals with folks. I haven't been super aggressive about it. For a while, I was doing pretty well on the syndication front. I started with Atlas Obscura, who I just reached out to myself. My most successful syndicate was Vice. It was very unfortunate that that ship sank. 

What portion of your income is Tedium? 

It varies. I'm not pulling from one basket, I'm usually pulling from six. So it's like a little Patreon here, a little sponsorship here, a little bit of using the attention that Tedium gets to lead to other work over here. Tedium is very much not a big business, but I think of it as building the halo.

Other than your Substack experiment, what do you do for growth? It doesn’t seem like you’re really playing the SEO game.

I keep an eye on SEO,  obviously, but I'm not building specifically for SEO. My subject lines and headlines are very anti-SEO, almost intentionally mysterious. Partly because it’s silly, and partly to get you to not necessarily prejudge the content before I convince you to read, you know, 3000 words about screw threads. 

For subscribers, over the years, various media mentions have helped. Syndication was a very strong driver. I've always liked the idea of people finding me organically. Like, on a Saturday afternoon, seeing search traffic spike on a five-year-old article on how Bob Vila left This Old House—clearly, there was a new episode of This Old House and people are watching it and Googling, what happened to Bob Vila?

You have long sent Tedium out as an email and posted it online. 

I like the fact that it’s on the open internet as well as in a letter. Some people come across the site and read, like 10 in a sitting. Some people get it in their inbox and read it in the moment, some let them build up and then read a bunch.³ I don't think it's my place as a writer to necessarily say, you have to read it this way. 

Yes, I like that platforms are moving in that direction, too. It’s a blog and a newsletter.

I think it doesn’t matter, as long as you read it. I was on an episode of Planet Money, and I got a bunch of emails in response. I remember one of them very vividly. It didn’t have anything in the body, it just had a subject line that was like, I wish this newsletter was a podcast. And I just don’t feel like I want to do that. There’s a way to do a podcast at some point, or a YouTube series at some point. But it would be a different thing. I think that there's just something unique about the written form.

Thank you Ernie! You have a good blog. And thank you for reading. See you soon. Let’s go read some blogs. Logan xx

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Tedium’s blog stack

• Craft CMS, CMS (“I have a custom-coded backend I maintain with Craft CMS”) 

• Email Octopus, email sends  

• Patreon, optional subscription service

• Plausible, analytics 

• Carbon, display ads

• VS Code, code editor, used for writing in Markdown (“I moved to Linux recently, and it was the best cross-platform option for me.”)

• iA Writer, editor for writing in Markdown. (“I wrote a love letter to it recently.”)

• Mixpost, self-hosted social media management

1. I basically think “newsletter” and “blog” are interchangeable but try to use them in the “traditional” sense. This is a blog, but I want your email, so I mostly call it a newsletter, etc.

2. “Back in our day, we were mentioned by both Time and Newsweek when that meant something,” is how Ernie describes it on his site, which delights and humbles me (I’ve used kept the Billfold’s Time mention front and center in my bio without that caveat for … many years)

3. This is how I like to read most newsletters I subscribe to, and it was gratifying to read that Ernie sees this in his readers, too. It really sucks when newsletters aggressively clean their lists. Reminder that we (people who read many months worth of newsletter issues in one sitting) exist. Don’t unsubscribe us!