Over at Cingely.com, Bob Cringely has finally has explained why he is “quitting”.  Basically, a web writer trying to create a destination blog does not pay the bills any longer.  In his story  Facebook, Cringely and the devolution of the web   Bob says :

“I could do a lot better job of marketing this rag and have, in fact, done some little things.  We have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) now… But I’m basically unwilling to do much more that might compromise content. Link exchanges? Paid guest posts? Not for me.I could start selling my own ads and save the commission, but that only makes sense for a rag this small if there’s a single advertiser out there who wants to buy my entire ad inventory, hopefully forever. ..There are more things I could do to stretch out the inevitable as I am sure many commenters will shortly explain, but what’s key here is that any such herculean efforts wouldn’t change the endgame for this column…”

We totally understand.   Attracting an audience to a destination site is so much harder than it was just a couple years ago.   Here at 8bitrocket.com we have had blips of success, but  nothing is ever sustained long enough for us to get any real traction.  We get offers for ad inserts, link exchanges, “guest blogs” , etc. all the time, but we fail to see how any of that will help us.   That is why, you will probably see, more and more,  things like this:   Pong Returns Gamasutra: Developer Diary Post For The Atari Pong Indie Developer Challenge, where we try to get our work onto other sites where the audience is larger and we don’t have to market the pieces ourselves.