The funnel that fed the free web

Josh Comeau's numbers are the kind creators rarely publish. His blog reached 1.4 million visitors in 2025 with no ads, no sponsors, no affiliate links; the whole thing was subsidized by "a fraction of 1%" of those readers buying one of his courses. From 2020 to 2025 that arrangement worked. In 2026 it stopped: existing courses "down significantly from last year," and other creators he's compared notes with all reporting the same slide.

What's worth sitting with is the mechanism he names, because it's specific to *learning* and cuts both ways. On the demand side, would-be developers doubt the jobs will still be there, so they stop investing in the skill. On the supply side, a chatbot now offers free, patient, personalized tutoring — the exact thing a paid course sold. Job-fear suppresses the willingness to learn at the same moment free tutoring undercuts the price of learning. The macro version of this is well-worn (search traffic to publishers fell by roughly a third worldwide over the past year); Comeau turns it into a first-person profit-and-loss.

The second-order loss is the one buried in his math. Every course sale, he points out, "effectively makes it possible for hundreds of other people to benefit from my work for free." The paying sliver was the reason the 1.4 million got anything. So the real casualty isn't one educator's income — it's the arrangement that funded a decade of high-quality free technical writing, and the open question of who bankrolls the next decade of it.