Why I Moved My Blog Back From Note To Self-Hosting

I pulled the note account I’d been using for about a year and moved back to my own company blog.

Here are the reasons why.

Did traffic increase?

The only real paths to blog readership are “getting picked up by search” or “posting to social media” — I don’t run a newsletter or have any tie-up with other sites, so those aren’t options for me.

When I moved to note, I expected that the platform itself would function as a distribution channel, giving me a certain amount of “inflow from circulation within note”: traffic where people arrive at my posts from other people’s posts on note, or from note’s event pages. Medium, which I’d used before, wasn’t very effective on this front either, though I think that had its own separate reasons.

So, to cut to the conclusion: circulation-based inflow on note turned out to be close to zero as well. Followers don’t seem to move the needle much either.

In short, note has almost none of that landing-page effect where people casually stop by to browse.

So the traffic path ends up being almost entirely social media. And if that’s the case, it’s no different from using my own company blog.

On search rankings

Search a specific keyword on Google or elsewhere, and note posts usually land around 5th to 7th place.

But even when I search a fairly deliberate, exact-match term, and even when the post in question has gotten a decent amount of traffic, it rarely reaches 1st place.

Quite a while back, when I ran a blog as a hobby, I had an article related to iOS that took off, and it consistently held the 1st to 3rd position even for fairly rough keyword searches.

I can’t fully explain this gap without getting into the details of the search algorithm, but my intuition is that posts on a platform like note always get evaluated somewhat decently by the search engine, but rarely get evaluated exceptionally highly.

A search ranking of 5th to 7th place is, in practical terms, the boundary between mattering and not mattering. Think back to your own behavior when searching for something and you’ll see this: most of the time, you only open up to around the 3rd result.

Paid sales as the premise

My current understanding is that note is convenient mainly as a platform for running a paid magazine or selling something for a fee. But since it takes a decent cut as a fee, if that’s the goal, there are plenty of other options. There’s also the option of putting in a bit more effort to format something properly and put it out on Kindle.

Building up assets

Most of my posts are essays on some topic, an attempt to organize my thinking on some phenomenon, or a sharing of my own experience, so I don’t think of them as particularly ephemeral. I write with the intention of accumulating something, not having it consumed in the moment.

I never got that sense of accumulation on note.

In the end, I came to see that as a kind of submission to the platform.

Leaning on something and becoming subordinate to it means handing over whatever you’ve built to that something as well.

My own domain, my own rented server: these aren’t free.

But even if it costs money, I want to choose the path where I properly build value for my own company, and for myself.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/06/421/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.