Why I Shut Down Four of My Sites This Year

You might notice that there aren’t as many case study reports on this site as there used to be. Okay, maybe you don’t notice it – not that many people read this site – but I’ll tell you that’s the case; when I first launched Site School, I used it as a platform to report on my portfolio of sites at regular intervals. How much traffic was I getting? How much was I earning? What was working? What was not?

Ah, those were the days! As many of my blogger friends know, I am the first to acknowledge how completely terrible it is to be a blogger right now; while I know the travel niche best, I’ve heard it’s brutal out there for everyone. Gone are the days of growing traffic and improved earnings; almost nothing is working (or at least not working as well) anymore.

Still, I am not one to go quietly into the night; I think it’s important to acknowledge what’s not working and what’s failing as much as to shout successes and strategies that deliver results. So I decided to write what I’m calling a “shutdown report,” acknowledging four of my sites that I have not only stopped working on, but have let the domains expire entirely.

(People asked me why I didn’t just leave them up, but I hate the idea of even a few readers finding bad or outdated content, and most don’t even earn enough to cover domain renewal fees anymore.)

So without further ado, here’s a final update on four of the sites I launched during the past few years, and why I’ve finally closed the book on each one.

Discover Sausalito

I launched Discover Sausalito in January 2020, shortly after moving from Oakland to Sausalito; the local destination marketing organization didn’t – and still doesn’t – have a good website, and there was an old, janky directory-style website that seemed easy to outrank. My goal was to reach 10,000 monhly pageviews and get the site onto Mediavine.

Unfortunately, as you can probably guess based on the timing, this site was doomed from almost the start: when the COVID-19 Pandemic caused major shutdowns across California, travel – even within the Bay Area – dropped to zero, and the site’s traffic went with it.

As the world re-opened and travel resumed over the subsequent years, traffic did recover, but it took until summer 2022 for me to crack 10,000 pageviews, by which time Mediavine had raised their main network minimum to 25,000 pageviews (and hadn’t yet released their lower-tier network, Journey). The next summer, the site came as close as 24,650 pageviews, but still, I couldn’t keep up the momentum for more than a few months, and – unsurprisingly – Google’s Helpful Content Update and subsequent core updates decimated the traffic to well below 10k again.

When I realized the lost cause, I megan migrating the content to Valerie & Valise (and then deleting a lot of it) and set up an htaccess redirect so the domain doesn’t even exist anymore; the domain will expire in December 2025. (I didn’t get all of the migration and technical stuff set up until January of this year, hence paying for an extra year!)

Follow the Butterflies

Hot on the heels of launching Discover Sausalito and watching it burst into flames – plus seeing the traffic on my other two sites rapidly drying up –, I was feeling pretty desperate in March 2020; I needed something to work on, so decided to launch Follow the Butterflies in April 2020.

With this site, I started testing a new model I eventually called the 10-10-10 launch plan; I seeded the site with several existing articles from Valerie & Valise to help me get early momentum. I also branched out from travel, creating a real “lifestyle” niche site, with recipes, interior design, clothing/costumes, and more. I was really excited about the site and to work on it – I have always been a big fan of Harry Potter despite J.K. Rowling transforming into a goblin as she amassed her billions. Anyway!

While I thought there would be a good opportunity for this site to grow and capitalize through both ads and affiliates, I quickly learned that the (business) world of Harry Potter is extremely competitive; no matter which part of the “lifestyle” I wrote about – travel, food, clothing, etc. – I was competing not only with the biggest brands and retailers, but with every other blogger in those categories who covered the same subject. For example, writing about Butterbeer means not only competing with official resources about the recipe, but probably tens of thousands of blogs that have their own recipes too – even though they weren’t Harry Potter blogs like mine.

Anyway, FTB did well for a time, climbing above 10,000 monthly pageviews pretty easily; I could see that I was never going to get a critical mass of traffic, so applied for SHE Media and monetized that way. I also got good at certain affiliate posts that helped me earn an income at different times of the year than other sites; turns out, I could rank for “Harry Potter costume” keywords in the months leading up to Halloween, which is a historically slow time for almost every other site of mine.

In any case, I finally realized that the site was not going to be worth investing in long term, and began migrating content off the site last fall (after Halloween!); I put the U.K. travel articles on London on My Mind, and the non-U.K. travel articles, recipes, and other content I wanted to keep on V&V. As of April 2025, the site is no more; it was a good five year run!

Great Plains Travel Guide

It sounds a little bit crazy now, but 2021 was one of the biggest years of growth for my business: I launched five sites that year: London On My Mind (in January), Great Plains Travel Guide (in March 2021), Soup Whoop (in April, more below), Jordan Traveler (in May), and Eat Like Bourdain (in June). Three of those four sites are still truckin’ along; unfortunately, GPTG is no more as of this year.

Much like my earlier sites, I launched GPTG with the 10/10/10 model; unlike earlier sites, there was no ‘spin out’ to launch it: I started with brand new content, written expressly for the site. Specifically, I saw that there were real gaps in the market for travel in and through the Great Plains, so I wanted to fill that with a site dedicated to the region. I did a ton of keyword research, created an incredible content map, and got to work.

Unlike my other sites, GPTG was also well-suited as a pandemic launch travel site, since most people road trip when traveling through this part of the U.S. and most of these states had fewer restrictions and lower infection rates – people wanted to travel in the Great Plains.

Delightfully, GPTG was also pretty successful, crossing 10,000 monthly pageviews at the one-year mark; it peaked as high as almost 30,000 pageviews in summer 2023, right before Google dropped the hammer. GPTG was devastated by the HCU, which was frustrating but at least a bit understandable since I think it was one of my weakest areas of expertise on any of the sites I run.

From that peak, the site eventually dropped over 95%, to less than 2,000 pageviews per month. Still, I could see the potential in some of the content, and migrated some of the best-performing and relevant content to V&V in advance of shutting the site down in January 2025. Interestingly, someone immediately purchased the expired domain and stuffed it full of AI-generated slop. It’s genuinely trash now, even worse than anything I ever did, showing that Google’s master plan to improve the quality of the internet has completely backfired since good sites are going away/getting outdated while content spammers thrive.

Soup Whoop

I don’t often talk about what I call my “little sites” in my mind – these are sites like D&D Community, Global Tiki Tour, and – in this case – Soup Whoop, that step far outside my typical topics and give me a space to play, learn, and encourage work in some areas of passion or interest for me. (At least, that’s what these sites did back when Google actually sent traffic to sites!)

I launched Soup Whoop in April 2021, after using RankMath to identify an opportunity for soup-specific keywords and content within the food blogger industry. Don’t forget now: this was the time when Google was still telling us to niche down, demonstrate EEAT, and thrive. I may not be a chef, but I love food and can make a decent soup; it seemed like an easy opportunity to learn more about food blogging and expand my abilities through recipe research and design.

Boy, did I learn a lot! First of all, lots of food bloggers cheat constantly, faking engagement and enthusiasm with artificial reviews and ratings from fellow bloggers, to try and game the Google algorithm for those parts of the rich snippets and search results. Secondly, and more unsupririsgly, food blogging is extremely competitive. It’s a cutthroat world where basically nothing is safe or sacred: I can literally copy your list of ingredients and recipe, change a half-dozen words, shoot my own photos (or, more often, pay someone else to shoot photos/generate them with AI), and try to outrank you. Honestly, food blogging is the least-fun macro-niche I’ve tried.

Anyway, I half-assed this site; I never had more than 20 recipes on it, and it flopped… until March 2024, when Google decided to grace a few recipes with a huge boost following a core update. Why? F*ck if I know. It had nothing going for it, beyond the fact that it was so small, it might have been the only site that wasn’t hit in previous updates for some of the keywords. (Also, RankMath was accurate in that I was able to rank pretty well with a poorly-done site on some mildly competitive keywords because there just weren’t many sites targeting them.)

Finally, I gave up: starting in January, I began offering the posts (including recipes and photos) wholesale to food bloggers in exchange for backlinks to V&V. It did absolutely nothing to boost V&V from a Google perspective, but at least the content didn’t evaporate from the internet. As of March 2025, the domain is expired.

What Did I Learn From These Sites?

It feels weird to spend… *checks* …over 1,500 words talking about a bunch of failures. It’s not what you typically see business coaches (or whatever) shouting about on the internet.

But frankly, we learn as much or more from failure. And you – dear reader – get more than I do, because these are my failures, my wasted time and resources, that you can learn from.

So here’s what I’ve got:

1. Market research is essential. If you’re thinking of starting a new site, do a lot of research and planning to understand the whole scope of the project you hope to build. Don’t waste your time on site that don’t have the genuine – realistic – potential to make it to Mediavine levels; any other ad networks (even Journey) with lower requirements won’t be worth your time or money in the long run.
2. Commit or get off the pot. This is a nicer version of a vulgar expression, but it’s true: if after all that research, you decide to go ahead with a new site, don’t launch unless you have the bandwidth and wearwithall to carry on for a few years and see if it’s really going to work. Soup Whoop (along with D&DC and GTT) are great examples of me failing because I didn’t try. Don’t be me – save your energy, time, and money.
3. Don’t rely on Google anymore. I say this in basically every post I publish now, but it’s (still) true: none of these sites would have done even as well as they did in today’s Google. They were only viable ideas in the era of relatively free traffic; now we all have to think of how to get people to our sites and build a community without the firehose of Google’s monopolistic chokehold on organic traffic. (Here are some ideas.)
4. Do what you love… It’ll still be work, but it’ll be more tolerable. Having run as many sites as I have – and watching almost all of them be destroyed by Google algorithm changes, I can’t say it was all fun and games. I’ve worked… a lot. I’ve invested and spent… a lot. I am still the toughest boss I’ve ever had. But I also love what I do and continue – despite “losing” these sites – to have the freedom to do it. That makes it a more tolerable situation.

I guess I’ll wrap it up here; I don’t have any pithy or witty thoughts to conclude this meandering walk down a depressing memory lane. I still hope it has been helpful for you to read my hopes for these sites, the realities I faced, and the decisions I made to shut them down. Any questions? Let me know in the comments below!