Space Tourism Guide 8 Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

It feels like a cliche at this point to comment on how much blogging has changed in the past few years. I’ve been doing this for a long time – my oldest site, Valerie & Valise, turned 12 years old last month – so I’ve seen ups and downs, trends and changing strategies, but nothing like what has happened to authoritative blogs and professional bloggers in the two years since September 2023.

Gone are the days where a portfolio of good backlinks and mentions and high-quality content written by an expert are enough to get you to rank in Google – in fact it seems that those things will eventually count against you, once Google scrapes your content, feeds it into their Large Language Model, and turns on AI results for the keywords you rank on. The hammer drops for everyone eventually, something newer bloggers alway seems to ignore me about while their times are good; I lost almost 75% of my total traffic across all sites, but hey what do I know?

Space Tourism Guide was my hardest hit site by far; it has lost 95% of traffic from its peak, and limps along at an embarrassingly low traffic level now. Nothing I have tried in the past two years has helped, and I’ve continued to turn away from this project in favor of my other sites that, well, make literally any meaningful money at all.

Nevertheless, I’m here, and I want to hold myself to account with an annual update. Below you’ll find the latest case study on STG, which looks at the past year, and where this site is headed next. Curious what to do when a site is dead? Read on and comisserate with me!

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 – 12 years
• Space Tourism Guide – 8 years  (this post!)
• Discover Sausalito*
• Follow the Butterflies*
• London on My Mind – 4 years
• Great Plains Travel Guide*
• Jordan Traveler – 4 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 4 years

*I shut down these three sites this year; read more about that decision.

(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 11/1/25)	215
Publishing Cadence	Monthly*
Monthly Pageviews (last month)	15,546 (October 2025)
Maximum Pageviews (all time)	303,254 (August 2023)
Google Traffic % (last six months)	67.8%
Email Subscribers	2,106

*I have been publishing less than 1 new article per month this year.

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. From there, the site began to grow quickly, and became my biggest traffic site within just a few months – it was actually the first site that qualified me for Mediavine ads, even though I started Valerie & Valise four years earlier (in 2013).

From 2018 trough 2023, traffic was stable but growing year over year; the red line (2019) was higher than the blue line (2018), the yellow (2020) and green (2021) lines, the orange line (2022) grew, and the teal line (2023) grew again – but as you can see from the huge spike, it was the best of times… followed by the beginning the worst of times.

STG began a downward spiral following the Google “Helpful” Content Update in September 2023, and now receives just 5% of the traffic it received during its peak. The site has never recovered in any meaningful way, as evidenced by the purple line (2024) and the black line (2025), which now sits even lower than my first full year of blogging.

Today, a variety of non-expert sites gained positions and now rank for the keywords this site used to dominate. As I said last year, I do not believe this site will ever recover; I’ll address what I plan to do next later in this recap.

Strategic Takeaways

Over the past year since I wrote my seven-year recap, not much has changed. This time last year, I mulled on the following takeaways from the worst year of my business (to that point):

• Nothing Lasts Forever – I learned the hard way that even well-built projects can collapse; you always need to be building the next parachute.
• Google is Full of Sh*t – Even my most authoritative site got wrecked by HCU – proof that Google’s guidance is worthless. Serve your readers, and stop relying on Google.
• Follow Your Passion – I cared deeply about this site once, but years of setbacks and Google wiping out my work have drained my connection to it.

As I mentioned in the last section, I don’t believe there are any real lessons to learn here; Google did this, not me. There’s not much to learn other than to not build businesses reliant on Google (or similar monopolistic algorithms) anymore.

I also said I’m not really working on this site, and that’s still true: I have published only 5 new articles in the first 11 months of the year (with two more planned before the end of the year). I’ve been updating relevant articles to either make them evergreen (part of my goal last year to future-proof my site) or keep them accurate for this year (like my monthly night sky guides and astronomy event guides)… Other than that? Not much. This site has always been a comparatively low earner on ads and affiliates, and that’s no different at 15,000 pageviews than it was at 300,000 pageviews.

My main strategic takeaway is to focus my energy and time elsewhere while still keeping the site at the bare minimum in stasis. 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 2025). In brief, they were:

1. Repurpose content for Forbes – I had originally planned to migrate articles from STG to Forbes to try and earn more.
2. Keep annual posts updated – As mentioned in the previous section, this is essential for what little traffic the site gets.
3. Future-proof the site in every other way – This was an ongoing effort to remove years and other time-specific details from any articles I could.

I did not focus on Forbes this year as I determined I would make less from articles on that site, but I’m tempted to re-visit that idea for the coming year; I have 113 city & state stargazing guides that only earn around $5-10 per month – total. These could earn me one-time payments plus potential ongoing traffic bonuses from Forbes if I migrated them. For that reason, I’ll leave that on the list of goals for the coming year, with a modification

I want to try testing how content performs on Forbes, so I’m going to try migrating the 5 lowest performing city guides and the 5 lowest performing state guides. If those do even marginally better on Forbes than they do on my site, it will be worth the effort rather than deleting those posts. (I’ll shorten this to “Test migrating content to Forbes” in future check-ins.)

Edit to Add: About three days after I published this, I received an email from Forbes telling me that my contract was terminated, because I did not “publish at least two articles a month on a regular basis,” and probably because I failed to publish “stories [that] make an impact — garnering an engaged, loyal audience.” I mean, fair. I haven’t been focused on Forbes in a while, and most topics I wanted to cover were already being written by another writer and they wouldn’t carve the astrotourism space out for me. So I guess I won’t be migrating articles over there to test that!

Other than that, I don’t have goals for this site. I’ve already scheduled all of my newsletters for 2026 to try and drive a bit more traffic, and I’ve got my content scheduled out for most of the year too, with no new articles planned at all. I know this handicaps any potential growth from new content, but I don’t see new articles as worth the time or effort anymore.

As time has gone by, the sting of STG‘s fall has lessened somewhat – or maybe I’ve just stopped caring. I genuinely thing Google shit the bed by destroying small publishers, but it’s been more than two years and they don’t seem to be facing consequences for it anyway. I am glad for the success STG had and the doors it opened, but I need to continue moving on. I don’t think I’ll ever let Space Tourism Guide go completely, but the future looks very different than the past.

I’ll wrap this up here, but I’d love to answer any questions you have. Let me know in the comments what more you’d like to know about STG and my plans for it.