The Old Personal Web Is Going Quiet

I read a post recently (Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear) about personal sites going quiet. The owners don’t announce they’re done. One day, the site just returns a 404. The author wondered if it came down to burnout, social media, hosting costs, a lack of readers, or an aging community. They guessed many people still blogging are over 40, but called that an observation, not a finding. I went looking for data. Some of the hunch holds up. Some of it hasn’t been measured. Pew Research looked at web pages archived from 2013 to 2023 and found that a quarter had disappeared by October 2023. Older pages were more likely to be gone: about 38% of pages from 2013, compared with 8% from 2023. Even pages from 2021 had lost about one in five within two years. That’s the web in general, not personal sites. And most of the missing pages came from sites that were still running. A dead page and a dead blog aren’t the same thing. Some pages can also be found in the Internet Archive after they vanish…