Small Blog, Valuable Content
Why I’m Changing My Approach
Byte Sized Tech Tips (BSTT) is a little more than two years old. I started writing it as a hobby. My job affords me a lot of unstructured time. I filled it by reading and then writing about AI because I’ve always been interested in technology. I took a short holiday that summer and found myself in coffee shops writing more extensively. Gradually I became serious about creating content. I did not take the business part seriously; my living didn’t depend on writing. With slightly more than 350 subscribers on Substack and LinkedIn, I have a small but high quality audience that I appreciate and that motivates me to keep at it.
That pretty much summed up my approach until recently. I had been writing about vibe coding and wondered if I could create an app to scrape the web for sources and citations to support my blog articles. I discovered that, as with so many things AI, it was harder than advertised. Then I discovered Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. One of the many things they do is scrape the web for sources and citations. After finding these nuggets, it can summarize and organize them into a blog post.
That, in short, was how the AI Intelligencer was born.
I’ve now published more than 20 editions of the AI Intelligencer. Each edition curates and synthesizes accurate, measured AI intelligence for professionals who need facts, not forecasts. It provides a calm synthesis of what is happening and what it means.
I’ve been a business owner, will be again soon. I am experienced in strategic planning and marketing communications. I’ve done a lot of research for business. I recognize value when I see it.
The content in the AI Intelligencer is too valuable to publish for free.
“Don’t Publish, Sell” Is Smart Advice
I don’t remember where I heard it, didn’t make note of it at first. But the idea stuck, crept into my thinking, germinated until it flowered. Someone said that small bloggers shouldn’t publish, they should sell. It took a few days until I realized that meant me.
A blogger without a large subscriber base has no algorithmic advantage. On open platforms, content without reach gets scraped before it gets read. You do the work, AI companies take the value, and you get nothing — not even the audience.
As a small publisher I’m actually better positioned to sell than to compete for attention. I’m not going to find 100,000 readers the way I’m going. While I pride myself in providing a unique perspective on AI – the search for a personal overarching strategy – there are too many well informed and articulate bloggers covering the subject. I don’t stand out and don’t have the budget or even the desire to attract a large audience. It’s not my business model, not the plan.
However, if I can find 50 buyers willing to pay a monthly fee for hard-to-find intelligence, it’s possible to make significant revenue by building on depth, not scale.
Publishing chases audience. Selling targets buyers. Those are completely different games, and the selling game doesn’t require you to win the attention war first.
The advice is especially powerful for niche verticals like public health or supply chain I’ve covered in the AI Intelligencer. Finding the right 50 people — a VP of Operations, a hospital procurement director, a PE analyst — builds a bigger business than a blog with 50,000 casual readers who will never pay for anything. And BSTT is well short of that many readers.
Another Reason to Sell, Not Publish
Publishing content openly — even behind a standard paywall — exposes it to scraping by AI companies building training datasets. Once your analysis is ingested into a large language model, your intellectual property effectively becomes part of a commercial product you receive nothing for.
My new model treats research as a proprietary asset to sell under controlled conditions. It’s not available for scraping or training. The deeper logic is this: the higher the quality of the AI analysis, the more valuable it is to AI companies as training data. Publishing it freely accelerates the capabilities of the very industry you’re covering, while selling it keeps that value in my pocket.
It sounds so easy, you just have to do it. Just like vibe coding.
Not so Fast, Not So Easy
I won’t be publishing the AI Intelligencer regularly in the future, certainly not as a weekly companion piece to BSTT. I will keep writing the general interest AI blog, it has its purposes and I have you, my audience.
Structuring a paid research business will take a little time. I have a 6- to-8-week plan. Right now, I’m struggling with the name. It will not be AI Intelligencer; I can do better. New Substack and LinkedIn modules are needed that includes an archive loaded with existing content. What will an editorial calendar look like? There will be a tiered product mix, but what will the tiers be? How will I collect the fees? What contractual guarantees will be offered? And, of course, pre-launch and launch events have to be planned and promoted.
It’s easier than vibe coding, I’ve done this before.