The Loneliness of Lacking Traffic 

Every content creator, every business owner, or perhaps even every human being in this world has likely experienced, or is still experiencing, this kind of loneliness. It's the loneliness that comes from a lack of traffic... I once found an ASMR channel on YouTube that was perfectly to my taste, but its last upload was three years ago. To me, it was like the brightest gem in the vast ASMR market, but the person behind it probably fought a lonely battle. It's highly likely they tried various things, but without market response, they lost momentum and gave up. 

Many people, before starting something, believe that if they just do it, people will look into how they did it. In fact, such thoughts can even lead to procrastination. They want to do it perfectly and show great results, but they feel like they're not at that stage yet, so they postpone, and postpone, and postpone! But reality is harsh. "Harsh" doesn't mean "people are cold" at all; it's that the way the world works itself is harsh. The completeness of a result doesn't determine its success. A high-quality work might serve as a shield against criticism, but the world consumes unfinished products and ignores finished ones. All those countless articles that appear at the top of a search right now aren't there because they're "good articles." 

Exposure and Needs 

For any content to be consumed, it must first be exposed to the consumer, and it must permeate the consumer's needs in a very abstract way. By "abstract way," for example, it's more important to sell "products that *feel* healthy" than to practically sell "healthy food" to people who want healthy food. This "feeling" is abstract because it's impossible to pinpoint exactly which elements it depends on. 

Let's take another example. People seem to dislike AI-written articles, AI-created videos, and AI voices, on the surface. However, AI-generated content is undoubtedly being actively consumed even at this very moment. This means that, even if it appears that the use of AI determines whether people feel aversion or not, whether or not it gets consumed doesn't actually depend on AI itself, but on the chemistry between the content created with it and the consumers encountering it.

Is Blogging a Red Ocean? 

Blog traffic usually comes through searches, unless you directly promote your blog by linking it in communities or similar places. So, what are the odds that my blog will be exposed through a search? 

Naver Blog has a neighbor feature, and Tistory also has a subscription feature. Even Japan's Ameba Blog (Ameblo) basically has a follow function. However, people want to view the content they want at the moment they want it; they consider content that suddenly appears before their eyes at any time to be noise. Often, people follow not because they genuinely want to follow, but because they also run a blog and follow others to boost their own blog's activity. This is even more true for blogs than for Instagram. 

As a blogger, there are largely two things you can do. One is to create an environment where your content can be exposed as much as possible on search engines, and the other is to consistently produce content you can handle, even if there's no traffic.