Space Tourism Guide 7 Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

In the entrepreneurship world, there’s something akin to the “seven-year itch;” similar to the marriage-based concept that one gets antsy after seven years, in business, it means that you might start looking elsewhere – perhaps by launching another business venture or taking another role.

When it comes to Space Tourism Guide, it’s not so much a seven-year itch – I was clearly losing interest in STG for a few years now, if you look back on my past recaps. Instead, I’d call it a “seven-year accept-the-reality-that-Google-has-destroyed-your-site process.” Yep, you read that right: even in the face of a strong brand, plenty of EEAT, and bylines and backlinks up the wazoo, STG is collateral damage in Google’s hair-brained attempts to keep up with the AI revolution changing how we search the internet forever.

In this recap, I’m looking back as much as I’m looking forward. Below, you’ll find my self-analysis of what has happened to STG over its whole lifetime and in the past year, what I’ve learned, and what I plan to do next. STG is a very different beast than my other sites simply because of the public prominence I’ve gained around this topic – I’m not walking away from the topic, but the site is a different story.

Ready to read on? Let’s go!

What are these Case Studies?

As a reminder, I do case studies for almost every site I’ve created, at the 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month marks. Then I switch to every six months for the next year; you can expect reports at 18 months and 24 months. If a site reaches its two-year mark and I plan to continue writing, I’ll either continue semi-annual or switch to annual reports. Given the ages of all of my sites, I publish annual reports about each of them currently:

• Valerie & Valise – 11 years
• Space Tourism Guide – 7 years (this post!)
• Discover Sausalito – 4 years
• Follow the Butterflies – 4 years
• London on My Mind – 3 years  
• Great Plains Travel Guide – 3 years
• Jordan Traveler – 3 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 3 years

(Links will take you to the full list of reports about that site!)

Fast Facts

Here’s a quick glance at the stats for Space Tourism Guide at the seven-year mark:

Date First Published	November 15, 2017
Articles Live (as of 11/1/21)	228
Publishing Cadence	Occasionally
Monthly Pageviews (last month)	40,752 (October 2024)
Maximum Pageviews (all time)	303,254 (August 2023)
Google Traffic % (last six months)	71.2%
Email Subscribers	4,505

History & Status of Space Tourism Guide

I started STG in February 2017 on Medium, but technically consider the beginning of my site as November 2017 when I migrated to WordPress. I know Medium has changed, but omg there was ZERO traffic on Medium seven years ago; the site was DOA until I moved to WordPress, and then it started to pop with traffic.

It’s a little hard to tell from this chart, but for most of the past seven years, traffic has been pretty stable with a bit of growth from year to year. 2023 was very different: as you can see from the huge spike, it was the best of times… and the worst of times.

STG was hit hard by the Google “Helpful” Content Update in September 2023, systematically destroying traffic from the site’s best month ever (over 300,000 pageviews in August) by around 90% to where it is today (around 30,000 pageviews on an average month). I do not see any way for the site to recover, so I’ll address what I plan to do next later in this recap.

Strategic Takeaways

When I wrote my six-year recap, I could already tell that Summer 2023 was an outlier in terms of performance – but I didn’t quite understand that STG was about to be destroyed wholesale to the point where I can’t even prioritize working on it.

My strategic takeaways last year are thus very different than the ones I have to share this year.

Nothing Lasts Forever

I can only speak for myself, but I guess I never imagined that when I decided to step away from most or all of my websites, it would be because of all of them going into a death spin at the same time. I sort of though that my sites would always do at least pretty well – maybe I’d start working on something else someday and they’d eventually start to shrink due to becoming outdated. I didn’t think that perfectly good, accurate, helpful content would just not be ‘good enough’ for Google.

All of this has taught me that even a parachute you build yourself – after all, STG was the project that gave me the confidence and security to leave my last traditional job in 2018 – won’t last forever. You’ve always got to be building the next parachute.

Google is Full of Sh*t

When I talk to people, especially SEOs, about the impact HCU has had on my sites, STG is the one that always surprises them. After all, this is a site where I hold unique topical expertise and have a strong personal brand associated with the site (I wrote the f*cking book about the topic for Lonely Planet, I write for Forbes on a similar topic, etc.). These are things Google said would insulate us from the impacts of algorithm updates like the HCU – or having these things would help us recover.

Google is full of shit. Do not believe any advice they give you. They don’t even know what they’re doing anymore.

If you want to keep blogging, do what you know is right for your readers – and look for traffic literally anywhere other than Google.

Follow Your Passion

Last year, one of my strategic takeaways was “It’s Okay to Lose Interest and/or Move On.” Well, lemme tell ya: if you thought I was uninterested in this topic when the site was doing pretty well, you can imagine how much interest I have now that Google has erased six years of my hard work.

There was a time when I truly cared very deeply about the site and my mission on it. I think that (1) the pandemic and being stuck in a city with terrible light pollution, (2) Elon Musk’s insanity, and (3) business failures due to factors outside my control, have all come together to make it hard to see where to go next. I feel disconnected from the topic of the site and the awe it usually inspires within me; I’ve felt that way for a long time.

So while I don’t know what the future will hold for STG, I know that my attention is and will be elsewhere.

What’s Next

I’ve been sharing my progress on the goals I set for STG in this past year, over in my quarterly accountability reports (here’s the most recent one for Q3 2024). I won’t rehash those, since I’m trying to look forward and figure out what’s next. Here are some thoughts I have at this point:

1. Repurpose content for Forbes – I took a two-year break from writing for Forbes, but have been given the green light to start contributing again. I’m hopeful I can take some of my more ‘SEO-focused’ content and repurpose it into content that works well for Forbes‘ newsy style and ranks in Google (since Forbes seems nigh-invincible in Google’s new algorithm). Particularly, I’d like to migrate some of my stargazing in [city] guides to test how those do; I plan to 301 redirect from my site to Forbes when I do this.
2. Keep updating gear posts, monthly guides, and annual events each year. There’s a series of 12 monthly night sky guides, 6 meteor shower posts, 4 gear posts, and a smattering of other posts that need occasional updates to stay accurate and keep bringing me traffic. I’ll keep on with those into 2025, since they’re the only thing left moving the needle. I also have
3. Future-proof the site in every other way. Also in 2025, I am moving toward the site needing fewer updates overall; right now, I’m working with my writer to remove dates and specific details from certain posts, and then need to audit the rest of the site and triage what to do with each article: leave as-is, update to make less “year-specific,” keep updating annually, migrate to Forbes, or delete.

Okay, I’ll wrap this up here, but I’d love to answer any questions you have. I don’t think I’ll ever let Space Tourism Guide go completely, but the future looks very different than the past. Let me know in the comments what more you’d like to know about STG and my plans for it.