Ten years ago, I first noticed that my blog (which had been on Blogspot since I started it in 2013) was getting huge spikes in hits. Normally, that would be good news, except for one thing: The increased hits (called pageviews in Blogspot) weren't for new posts but for old ones, probably going back years. And instead of being concentrated on a few all-time favorite posts, these increased hits seemed to be spread across all of my old posts, including some posts that I would love to send to sleep with the fishes (but I have never completely deleted an old post).
I didn't know what to make of this phenomenon and asked my readers if they knew, but I got no response, so I just filed it away as a curiosity. However, these unexplained hits continued to grow and more importantly spread to other countries, such as Singapore and Hong Kong - to the point where four or five years ago I had more annual hits from Singapore than I did from the US. This wouldn't itself be strange, were it not for the fact that until about 2020, my posts were mostly about the NERC CIP cybersecurity standards for the North American electric power industry (that's still my number one topic, although vulnerability management is a close number two nowadays). I strongly doubt there's a huge body of NERC CIP affondicios hiding out in Singapore. Who would have known? 😊
Two or three years ago, the reason for these hits became clear: My blog is being heavily used for AI training, not because I'm a brilliant individual but because I'm almost the only independent source of information on NERC CIP, other than the "official" channels of NERC and the NERC Regional Entities. I've confirmed this myself, since sometimes responses to questions about CIP that I raise in ChatGPT or Google AI reference one of my posts.
Since then, my total pageviews on Blogspot have continued to rise, even though last August I set up a new blog on Substack, and copied all of my 1200 (at the time) posts since 2013 into it, while leaving those posts unchanged on Blogspot. I also started putting up all of my new posts exclusively in Substack (and in Energy Central, where I have put all new posts for the last eight years or so. I also put new posts in LinkedIn, but that's just the URL, not the whole post). The last post (before today) that I put up in Blogspot was this one.
Meanwhile, the growth rate for my Blogspot pageviews has become literally exponential. Last year, I think I averaged about 15-25,000 pageviews per month (which I thought then was good). Last month (May 2026), I had 274,000 hits in the month. This month (with two days remaining), my Blogpot pageviews have been 498,000. Clearly, I'll be hitting a million or more hits per month this year, maybe by the end of the summer.
But I'm not happy about this, and why should I be? If I had received a single email from someone asking about something I wrote 12 years ago, or pointing out an inconsistency between something I wrote in 2017 and something I wrote in 2020, I might feel a little differently, but I see no reason to keep my Blogspot blog up as a free resource for AI training - especially when all of those posts are available today in Substack.
But there's a difference with Substack: Most (although not all) of my posts that are over three months old have a paywall on them in Substack. To be able to read them, you need to pay the extortionate cost of a yearly subscription, $30 (although if you just want to see new posts when they come out, you can subscribe for free). And if you can't afford that, you just have to send me an email saying that, and I'll give you a complementary subscription (people with OpenAI or Anthropic email addresses need not apply).
Therefore, I will soon (perhaps this week) delete this blog. My guess (nay, hope) is the people who are doing all of the AI model training (if there are even any people left in that decision process) will be distressed with this news, since they may face the terrible choice of paying me $30 or shutting down their training based on my old posts. For those people, I recommend the immortal quote from the late philosopher Jimmy Carter: "Life is unfair."
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