Before I built this blog, I spent years trying everything else.
Reselling on China’s second-hand marketplace. Affiliate marketing. And — I’m not proud of this — I bought a course on how to make money with short videos.
It cost ¥50. The advice: buy a ring light, set up a 24-hour looping livestream on Douyin, sell small products or collect tips while you sleep.
I watched a few lessons. It felt hollow. Not wrong exactly — people do make money this way — just hollow. I closed the app and never went back.
Building a website felt smarter. More real. Something you own.
I built a WordPress site about side hustles and extra income. The plan: publish articles, grow a WeChat public account on the side, eventually apply for Google AdSense.
What I hadn’t fully understood yet was this: Chinese internet users had already moved on.
The Shift Nobody Warned Me About
By the time I started publishing articles, China had already moved to short video. Douyin. Kuaishou. WeChat Video. People weren’t reading blogs anymore — they were watching 60-second clips while commuting, eating, waiting for the bus.
Reading articles was already declining. Visiting independent websites — sites that weren’t Baidu, WeChat, or a major platform — was even rarer. The habit simply wasn’t there.
I was building a library in a city where everyone had stopped reading.
How It Became a Bookmarks Folder
I found most of my content through channels that ordinary users couldn’t easily access — information that was circulating in communities most people never saw. I’d copy things I found interesting and post them on the site.
The WeChat public account would funnel readers. Over time the account would grow. Eventually, ad revenue.
Except there were no readers. No readers, no WeChat followers. The funnel was pointing at an empty room.
After a while I stopped thinking of it as a business. I kept posting anyway — just habit. See something useful, copy it over. A guide about street food stalls. Tips for designated drivers. Resource lists for video creators. If it seemed interesting, it went in.
Eventually I had 1,502 articles and no revenue. A very large, publicly accessible bookmarks folder that nobody visited.
I stopped updating it.
What I Actually Learned
Honestly? Most of it was my own fault.
The content was scraped, not original. The site had no real identity. I was building for a Chinese audience that had already migrated to platforms I wasn’t on.
But there’s something real underneath the personal failures: building an independent website in China is genuinely hard. The traffic, the attention, the habits — they all live inside the big platforms. People scroll Douyin for entertainment, search on Baidu, shop on Taobao, read on WeChat. An independent site sits outside all of that.
That’s not an excuse. It’s context. The same effort, pointed in a different direction, might have worked.
So I pointed it in a different direction. English content, international audience, Google search. A blog about what it actually looks like to try and fail and try again.
That door was open the whole time. It just took me a few years to find it.
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