My top 10 posts of 2024: the bottom half

I bang on to my clients and students about the importance of looking at your analytics in the long term, endlessly. It's the only good way to separate out your evergreen content from the short-term attention hits, and any digital business needs to know that.

So, every year, I take the time to understand the dynamics of my own site, amongst others, and see which of the year's posts have really resonated. Here, in the first of two posts, is the bottom half of the most trafficked posts in 2024, annotated with some perspective (and a little snark…).

I hope you find it interesting.

10: What comes after Twitter?

Now, isn't that a good question? Months after I published this, it's still far from being answered. I suspect we'll never get a clear answer. It's not going to be “Bluesky has replaced Twitter” or “Threads has replaced Twitter”, but different answers for different people, depending on the community they're part of.

That's a harder environment for us to navigate. But it's much, much more healthy as an ecosystem. Today's announcement from Zuckerberg shows how dangerous a social media ecosystem dominated by one or two players actually is…

What comes after Twitter?

And are we wordsmiths doomed to be replaced by the video stars?

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

9: Shrimp Jesus and other unexpected results of the AI boom

Welcome to this year's unexpected SEO success. I rank well for “shrimp Jesus”, which is probably not something I'm going to be admitting to Rev'd Jane anytime soon.

There's still something interesting in here about how any new tech can be turned into a way of hacking attention on social platforms through engagement bait. But mainly, this is the power of a silly headline.

Also, as people who have been on the internet far too long know, God hates shrimp.

Shrimp Jesus and other unexpected results of the AI boom

AI is at once more ubiquitous and less useful than people think. Navigating the coming flood of generated content is going to be a challenge.

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

8: Stop the slop

Talking of AI…

…I sincerely hope that 2025 turns out to be the year that publishers who have thrown themselves into AI generation of copy get seriously burnt. Using the word “slop” to describe low-value AI output thrust into the audience's attention stream seems to have stuck.

Are you proud of publishing slop? Do you want to work for a publishers that's dishing out slop? These are questions we need to ask…

Stop the AI Slop

The perfect word to describe thoughtless, rude use of AI has emerged. Let’s hope it sticks…

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

7: The second age of digital journalism is over

OK, getting a bit more serious now. 2024 was the year that the big beasts of the previous decade finally fell. Sites like Vice and Buzzfeed are shells of their former selves. It's clear, as I explore in this post, that the business model of taking lashings of VC cash, building a big but unengaged audience and hoping that money will magically follow is done.

While some people want to characterise this as a failure of the digital world, I think it's more useful to see it as the end of an experiment, that clarifies that we need to take very different approaches to building sustainable online publications.

The second age of digital journalism is over

Vice is the latest digital player to collapse. But the phoenix of the third era of digital media is being birthed in the ashes of the social web age.

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

6: Facebook is done with our shit, frankly

And, while we're on the subject of failed business models, building an audience on Facebook, and enjoying the traffic from it, looked like a dodgy proposition by the true of the decade, and it seemed dead and buried by the middle of 2024.

That said, old sugarmountain's announcement today makes me wonder if there's a zombie-like reanimation coming:

View on Threads

Could this be a way back in as “civic content” feels awfully like a euphemism for politics? Or will the suppression of links prevent that?

Meta is done with journalism. It’s time to move on.

It’s never easy being dumped. But Meta has dumped us good and hard. We need to accept that — and move on.

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

Come back tomorrow for the top five most read posts from last year.

Oh, and maybe sign up for the (free!) Smartocto webinar where I'll be talking about newsletters…