It's the end of an era at Epic Gardening... In the early days, Epic was a WordPress blog. I built it as a "digital resume" for the website design work I was doing at the time and chronicled some of my experiments growing plants in hydroponic systems... This was 2013. I learned that blogs could make a bit of cash, and dove headfirst into the world of blogging, SEO, and blog monetization. A few articles turned into thousands, mostly making money off of display ads and affiliate links. Classic blogger stuff.... There were some huge days back then, but nothing as huge as when we launched our shop. I put it on a subdomain, because "the blog was the business, after all." Then two things happened: 1. Product sales became the vast majority of our revenue 2. AI decimated direct traffic to blogs We've lost a massive amount of our organic traffic over the last 3-4 years. Not because the content got worse, but because people don't need or want to click anymore. Someone asks Google or ChatGPT why their tomatoes are splitting and gets an answer stitched together from sites like ours, without ever visiting it (In case you can't tell, I'm still salty about this. Not sure how it's ethical to scrape the entire internet for original content, then serve it as your own and delete a click from the original author, but I digress...) At a certain point there's, no reason to keep giving your best real estate to a blog that no longer pays for itself. So we moved the entire site to the main domain so you can learn AND shop in the same place The "write great answers, rank on Google, monetize with ads" model is mostly dead for informational content. If an AI can summarize it, it will, and consumers will use that solution because it's lower friction. Lower friction almost always wins regardless of any moral argument Kind of bittersweet for me, though. That blog funded everything we've built at Epic Gardening since, and I'm proud of it, but times change!