Niche Product Sites Case Study #7 – Algorithm Chaos

Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on January 21, 2025.

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Welcome to the seventh entry into our niche product site case study series.

In this case study, we are tracking the performance of niche product sites I created between 2020 and 2022, sharing what is working, what is not, income and traffic changes, and lessons learned along the way.

The first site we will look at is The Grape Pursuit, a wine blog I started in early 2020. The second site is Hipster Homesteaders, a home & garden plus food & beverage blog we started in late 2021 (where we merged two lagging product sites, a coffee blog and sous vide blog, into a broader umbrella branding to allow for more content to be produced with other topics).

Before jumping into this, I should note that my original intent for this series was to provide an update every six months. But with all that happened in 2024, I forgot to publish updates. So this one will cover everything that happened between September 2023 and January 2025. For those who know all that has gone on in blogging over this time, you'll understand when I say the theme is simply this- chaos.

The Grape Pursuit

Rare Grape

The Grape Pursuit is a wine blog chronicling our quest to try every grape variety in the world. The last 15 months have been in a bit of a holding pattern producing content, namely articles on our blog, as we continue to try every grape variety out there.

We are now at 337 varieties, an increase of about +36 in the last 15 months. While this is not the pace I was wanting to have when we started the site, we have to admit it is kind of things go over time as we need to find rarer and rarer grapes for our quest. Thankfully, we can create way more wine content than just new grapes, so we still publish a lot either way independent of our quest.

This site was doing quite well, but was hit with an algorithm update and later recovered over the course of the last year. Yes, a rare recovery! We went from 25,000 page views per month to 5,000 page views to month to back to 15,000 page views per month and immediately got into Mediavine Journey when the recovery happened. Little victories!

As of publishing this article, we have 2,196 followers on Instagram (+6), 1,000 followers on Facebook (+63), and 346 newsletter subscribers (+78). While I post on social media and send out our latest articles in the newsletter, I have to admit all of our work here has been passive. I don't do short-form videos (yet), and I am honestly just posting for fun most of the time- so growth has been slow.

In our last update in September 2023, we reported receiving 25,400 page views per month. In December 2024 to January 2025, we received 15,500 page views across 367 articles (+73 articles). All told, we'll take 15,000 page views even if it is a from from our last update, because there were times in between that were just that bad.

So far, we've made approximately $7,412 on the site to date, an increase of $2,400 from our last update. We had a big drop when our traffic decreased, but are now averaging around $200/month on affiliate sales and $100-$200/month on Journey revenue. (The latter was new towards the end of Q4, in case you are wondering why the overall increase is not as high as it should be.)

Although this is a drop from the $500/month we were earning overall in 2023, we are still not terribly upset because for the amount of work we put into this one we are netting a decent wine budget all the same. Still, it is going to take a bigger push to go to the next level, and that involves overhauling our social media approach to be more active, particularly with video.

We'll see where we end up in the next update!

Hipster Homesteaders

Guava

Our slower-moving product site, Hipster Homesteaders, is still about home and garden products. We merged sites in 2021 to form this broader concept, and have had it as a passive setup to share advice on gardening, beekeeping, cooking, and more.

As of publishing this article, we have 908 followers on Facebook (+401) and 410 followers on Instagram (+12). Much like with The Grape Pursuit, I have been losing interest in Instagram if only because I am not producing video on either of these channels yet, so I have been putting a nominal advertising budget into Facebook only. As such, we have very lopsided growth that I recognize I need to work on.

Over the past year, we published 24 more articles (86 in total) and, due to the algorithm updates, our traffic has completely collapsed. We're now averaging around 500 views per month if we're lucky, which was a drop of about 90% since our last update. The site is effectively dead; however, we still are writing on it purely as a place to log our thoughts on topics we like.

So far, we've made approximately $1,075 on the site to date, an increase of about $250 from our last update. We really are only promoting affiliate products here when we have a relevant product to talk about, and while we do sometimes make regular sales, we're still only netting around $20/month at most. Throw on that we took ads off and, yeah, it isn't great.

Admittedly, this site just shows how risky a single focus is, which in this case was search traffic and affiliate sales. We still love our topic, and will continue to write when inspiration strikes, but we just don't have enough time to do it justice in all of the other realms that are necessary for a successful blog these days (namely, a huge social presence). As such, this one will continue to hobble along until either something changes in an algorithm (unlikely) or we let it go (more likely).

So now you know why it was easy for me to forget about this series. When your two niche sites get put on the back burner, and then but on the back burner's back burner because you need to spend more time on your main sites than you did in the past, this is what happens. Whoops. Still, we continue on these sites because we simply like to share our thoughts, and that will keep going- for now, at least.

For earlier entries into this series, check out case study update #1update #2, update #3, update #4, update #5, update #6.

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