This is going to be a rather personal look at the past couple of months and how things have evolved since then.
As you may know, Softonic, the Spanish company that acquired Ghacks years ago, sold it in a rather hasty deal. The writing was on the wall for some time, especially since the budget for the site was cut in half more or less. This meant less articles written and it fueled the spiral downwards.
We, the writers, were not in the loop. One day in December, we were told that the site had been sold. Our access was cut immediately and the entire team was fired passively. Later, I was asked if I wanted to write a good-bye article, but it was already too late for that in my opinion.
Anyway, this meant that I stopped writing for Ghacks after nearly 20 years of doing so more or less every day. It was tough for Ashwin as well, who lost his main source of income.
There is little chance that the Ghacks situation is going to change in the future.
For now, these are the places that you can find my articles or takes at:
- Chipp.in, my personal blog: No ads, no tracking, tech news, some tutorials. I do not post as frequently as I’d like to.
- Weekly Tech Insights: a newsletter published once a week. I recently started to integrate longer takes on certain tech news, also has tutorials and other nice stuff. Totally free.
- Ask Woody Newsletter: I was approached by Will from the Ask Woody Newsletter some time ago and became a contributor. My plan is to submit articles to the newsletter regularly. Ashwin also started contributing.
- Gamestar Tech: This is the online tech section of one of the biggest German gaming magazines. Contribute daily tech news in German.
- Windows 11 Book: I have started working on the next revision of the book. Much has changed since 2024 and the book is in dire need of updating.
As far as personal sites are concerned, it is getting incredibly difficult to maintain them. AI tools are taking over, whether you like it or do not. More and more users will ask AI on search engine sites and elsewhere when they run into a problem or need an opinion or advice. This means less traffic to sites, which make less money as a consequence.
Many of my favorite tech news sites have vanished in the past couple of years. Google is changing its algorithm constantly and that usually means less visits. Yes, there are some holdouts, but even these face the problems.
You need to offer something that the competition or AI can’t bring to the table. And that is what I plan to do here. This site will never grow to Ghacks levels, as it is niche, not really indexed well in search engines. Means: only a handful of people will ever find it, unless an article gets suddenly pushed via a major Internet site.
My plan: grow slowly by word of mouth only, ignore search engines or AI, they are unpredictable. Build trust, never falter, never change. We will see how this goes.
I’ll take quality over quantity every day of the week. Totally avoid AI generated content where possible. Thanks for the update.
I always ask my customized AI companions before doing a web search. They are the best adblockers ever.
Obviously they make mistakes, sometimes so badly it’s funny, but those mistakes come from the websites full of ads I’m avoiding. AI’s don’t actually think, they just aggreagate what’s out there. Gemini has been having issues for a week now. Patch, crash, rollback, crash some more, sound familiar? 😉
Tech News Weekly looks interesting. Too bad commenting require an accout. I’ll be visting that one though.
Gamestar looks a bit too ‘fluffy’ for my taste.
Website are just code, it’s the writers one follows.
It’s indeed getting a tough labor to maintain a site nowadays, moreover when it is niche. Not being well indexed in search engines is the final straw.
AI is to blame in the way search engines and mainly Google impose it but also in the way the crowd prefers a digest of references rather than in-depth articles: “we want it now, we want it short” seems to be their leitmotiv. Maybe is our reaction to bad things in life more important than those bad things themselves: we accept, worse: we participate, worse even: we are blind to what imposes itself as contrary to our very interest. AI for the masses, handled within the limits of respect to all and to ourselves maybe is, maybe will prove to be valuable rather than catastrophic. For the time being it is relevant of business free of any moral standards and of some of us totally disinterested in knowledge yet eager to consume more or less valid extracts of reality as they’d eat a burger or drink a coke: consuming information.
The Ghacks odyssey. Those of us who have been assiduous readers of Martin and Ashwin articles back in the good old days have followed with sadness the end of a two decades’ fantastic adventure, and we have jumped to Chipp.in to carry on discovering technology here with Martin. We will continue. But you don’t make an army with good rifles and good will, you need the number of fighters; same with a Website, whatever its reputation of quality if it is not known widely.
“Grow slowly by word of mouth only, ignore search engines or AI, they are unpredictable. Build trust, never falter, never change. We will see how this goes.”.
If others grow Chipp.in should be in the first rows. But who can be sure, who can hope that the trend will reverse? Those of us old enough to have known the Web throughout decades may very well be sad about what it has become in 2026 and pessimistic about its deployment in the coming years. Or in an in-between state of mind: wait and see and, meanwhile, try to prefer quality articles to junk AI summaries.
Things are surely changing. But the independent thinkers will always approach it with feeling.
I surely miss the format and articles (linux stuff was nice)of the older ghacks, I visit this site daily. I wish you well and will read your stuff often.
I think you understand that gHacks was a brand and even now that (I believe) AI are churning out articles there that people are still visiting perhaps under the false belief that you are still somewhat involved or that the level of engagement there is worthwhile to stay. I cannot fault the second part of the logic because user engagement is a key part to what that site was for me also aside from the well written articles and insights from yourself and the team.
In terms of AI as a whole I feel as though those that use such tools probably were never going to visit gHacks or tech sites to start with and they are just casuals (putting it politely) that will usually get fed the wrong information and not be able to consistently articulate themselves upon matters.
Things have become a little more splintered elsewhere and a lot of it has to do with larger corporations throwing their weight around and like yourself you are having larger corporations taking ownership of other peoples words and monetizing that whilst offering a diminished product so we now have federated options such as Lemmy for example which splinters the community once again into smaller sub groups all whilst people are searching for their new home site.
I myself have pulled a few article comments in many places as I am very reluctant to feed the AI machine.
I despise AI in more or less all of its forms and consider it to be an insidious stain upon society built by even more insidious people aiming to monetize everything, profile everyone and sell their data to whatever agency that demands it. It’s legalized and globalized malware.
AI might have some uses but the way in which it is being used now is disgusting and I want no part of it.
I hope everything works out for you Martin as real people like yourself are valuable and essential to the internet of today and tomorrow.
My last comment on Ghacks was in 2022 and removed and so never posted because I said you made a mistake selling the site and thus causing it’s decline. I now think it was a good choice. You probably got enough money to be financialy secure, and feel less stress. That in turn give you the opportunity to do what you love and track the tech world and write about it at a less stressful pace. Now you have a plan to offer high quality content to us with no tracking. I do not mind ads, but I do not want tracking.
So in de end selling gHacks may now let us have a high quality tech news site, in a world where many are sadly going away, and you have a life with less stress.
So I am sorry for my earlier critique, and thank you for what you are going to do and I hope this site will grow (not too fast I hope) and be a success.
It was a difficult decision. The offer was good and I realized that it would become harder with each passing year to maintain the site as a one-man-operation. My hope was, that Softonic would use its massive resources to push the site. This did not work out for a number of reasons, which I won’t comment on. Mistakes were made, but it was unfortunate still.
For my sanity and health, it was the right move at the time. The stress of running a website was gone and it did wonders.
Go big on slamming big tech and praising/educating about linux and all the free and great stuff for android that’s not available on the Google Prey Store and you’ll be fine. The resistance is growing, I see it every day.
Takeovers by big corporations never end well… It always look good at first, but systematically goes wrong eventually. I wish you the best though, and I will continue to follow your articles here. I do miss the couple of interesting articles that I could read everyday in the past, as well as the active community commenting on them.
Ha, at last I found you!
At some point I had to “look around”, to find where did Martin Brinkmann disappeared.
I was a regular reader of Ghacks back before it changed its ways.
I am reading your articles via (good old) RSS.
I will keep doing so, even if I hardly ever comment.
Thank you for your articles.
Almost exactly my story – after so long of every Ghacks story in my RSS feed being written by “Arthur Kay,” I had to find out what happened. A reddit thread pointed me here.
Martin, I hope you don’t ever need to change what you’re trying to do here. A holdout against the “new” etch journalism model is a breath of fresh air.
Have a Great Day Martin…We Love Ya
I’ve always liked and followed your content (including that other, small personal website you made at some point, strictly about Privacy-related content which also quietly vanished), but the inexplicable interruption of UXP browser coverage (yes, Pale Moon etc.) remains, well, inexplicable and pushed me and others away.
It becomes even more absurd if you are going to complain about Google, AI and the rest of Web-ruining mega-corps and whatnot.