🪄I Gave HubPages One Last Chance. It Ghosted Me.💸
What happened when I tried to revive a once-great writing platform—plus what today’s creators should know before they invest their time anywhere.
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Fifteen years ago, HubPages was ahead of its time.
It wasn’t just another place to write—it was a place to earn.
Writers could post articles on any topic and generate passive income through Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links. Better yet, the platform syndicated your content across niche sites, meaning your piece on personal finance might appear on a site dedicated solely to that topic, while your article about decluttering could show up somewhere entirely different.
No pitching. No guest post begging.
Just write, post, earn, repeat.
It was writer heaven.
And incredibly, those old articles were still earning a few cents here and there.
Tiny trickles of income, sure—but proof of life.
So when I felt the urge this summer to test new writing platforms, I thought, why not give HubPages one more try?
Spoiler alert: It went terribly.
Hope in the HubPages Archive
I logged back into my old account and dusted off a few of my better-performing articles.
Some of them had been live for over a decade. I updated a few, published some new ones, and scheduled social posts to drive traffic to the refreshed content.
There were no red flags at this point.
Everything looked normal.
The articles were live.
The dashboard worked.
There was still a publish button.
The stats were tracking.
All signs pointed to “dormant, but functional.”
So I leaned in. Scheduled posts. Promoted links. Shared my words with the world again.
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Ghosted by HubPages: I Only Found Out Because Readers Told Me
And then the messages started rolling in.
“Hey, this link is broken.”
“Did you move your article somewhere else?”
“I was really looking forward to this one—what happened?”
Confused, I checked the links.
Then I checked my account.
Every article had been unpublished.
Even the ones that had been up for over a decade.
Even the freshly updated or newly published ones.
Gone.
Invisible.
Completely unavailable to readers.
But here’s the kicker: HubPages never told me.
No email.
No notification in my dashboard.
No status flags or “violation” messages.
Just silence.
I tried to republish—but there was no publish button.
I reached out to support—no answer.
No auto-reply, no case number, no bounce-back.
Nothing.
HubPages Is a Zombie Platform
After a little digging, the truth became obvious: HubPages is effectively dead.
They haven’t posted to their blog or social media in years.
There’s no public roadmap. No communication with writers.
No indication that anyone is actively managing the platform at all.
It’s like showing up to a once-thriving storefront, only to find the lights on, the register open, and not a soul in sight.
And if you didn’t know any better, you’d still walk in and start stocking the shelves.
That’s what makes this situation so dangerous for writers—there’s just enough function left to make it feel safe.
But it’s not.
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Build with Strategy, Not Fantasy
I’m not new to the internet.
I published my first niche website and blog in 1999.
I’ve been writing and building online businesses long enough to know that nothing lasts forever.
But there’s something especially cruel about a platform that doesn’t just fail—but quietly vanishes without telling the people who trusted it.
I don’t regret experimenting. That’s how I learn, and how I help my clients avoid the same mistakes.
At this point, the old advice: “Own your platform.” is probably echoing in your head. But in 2025? That’s mostly a myth. And this is why people follow me. I refuse to take the easy route and just regurgitate cliche advice, especially if that advice is bad.
So what should we learn from this experience? What should writers do in 2025 and beyond?
Google stopped favoring small blogs and niche websites years ago.
And now with AI search eating more clicks than ever, your lovingly maintained WordPress site might be invisible no matter how good your SEO game is.
The truth is, if you’re writing to build an audience or generate leads, you’re better off publishing on platforms that already have traffic—like Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, or even a well-aligned niche newsletter collective.
But there’s a catch: platforms are rented land.
And as my HubPages fiasco reminded me, you can lose everything—without warning, without explanation, without a single courtesy email.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t publish on a platform. It means you need to do it smarter.
How I Future-Proof My Writing (and How You Should Too):
🪄 1. Save everything you publish.
Create a cloud folder and back up every article, every post, every draft.
Don’t trust any platform—not even the “reliable” ones—to hold the only copy of your work.
🪄 2. Build your own reader pipeline.
Use a tool like Substack, Ghost, or Beehiiv to capture email addresses and stay in control of your audience.
Even if the platform disappears, your readers don’t have to.
(And yes—back up that email list to your cloud drive, too.)
What I’m Doing Now
📌 Publishing on platforms where I get reach: Medium, LinkedIn
📌Capturing my audience and bypassing algorithms with Substack.
📌Keeping a copy of my content in OneNote which saves a copy locally and automatically backs up to the cloud
📌Downloading my email list monthly
📌 Still experimenting, but always with an exit strategy.
That’s the sweet spot: platform reach + personal retention.
Use the tools, enjoy the visibility, but don’t let your work live exclusively somewhere that can disappear overnight. Never forget—
They’re guests at your party. Not the other way around.
That’s exactly why I publish across platforms and send everything through my newsletter (on a platform that gives me the ability to download that email list)—because if a site folds or a link breaks, I still have a direct line to my readers.
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Because you don’t need another platform.
You need a plan.
Stay Magical,
Cheryl
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