Can’t remember now how I ended up thinking about this, it was in a comment I made on someone’s blog - or it might have been while reading about the audaciously ambitious adventure of Jason Coulls over at MillionaireWithAdSense (a fellow Canadian; [oops; he's actually British] there’s something about Canadians and crazy online money-making adventures, maybe? Remember Kyle MacDonald and “One Red Paperclip“? :)).

The Oldest Personal Finance Blog

This should get some of you scratching your head. Think you know which it is? The Simple Dollar? Get Rich Slowly? Blueprint for Financial Prosperity? And how old do you think the blog is? Two years? Three years? Well, here’s what I found. Do contact me if you learn/know differently: comment on it down below. A very interesting fact is that the longer you’re in the blog business does not necessarily translate into how many subscribers you have. More recent blogs can easily have more subscribers than the oldest ones.

Consumerism Commentary: one of the biggest PF blogs out there, this was begun quite early. July 2003! And it’s still on its own site. 5466 subscribers.
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: this site was originally Ease of Travel; begun in November, 2003. On January 31, 2005, it moved over to where it is now at Bargaineering.com. It’s interesting because although it has been around longer (much longer, in blog terms) than Get Rich Slowly, you can see how fewer subscribers it has.
Free Money Finance: since April 2005. Subscribers: ?
Get Rich Slowly: on its own website since April 9, 2006 (looks like previous posts may have been deleted. J.D., when did you start your blog?). ***** Subscribers: 57,066.*****
Lazy Man and Money: begun May 2006. Currently has 2534 subscribers.
The Digerati Life: begun two years ago in July 2006, but doesn’t have the same subscriber count as The Simple Dollar and other giants. 3123 subscribers.
Generation X Finance: since at least October 2006. Has 2588 subscribers.
The Simple Dollar: on its own website since October 30, 2006 (I’m not sure about records before that). Has 33,275 subscribers.

Have I missed your blog? Know of an older one, or a personal finance blog with more subscribers?
I should also emphasize that just because a blog has more subscribers or has or has not been around as long as another blog - by any of this I don’t mean to judge the quality of the blog itself.

How Long Does a (PF) Blog Live?

What about blogs that have hit the dirt? If you peruse through old links, you’ll see a few that lost their steam or just grew into different projects. From this, can we infer that blogs have a certain lifespan? 4 years? 5 years? After all, it does take a lot of work to keep one up. I can’t tell you how many dead blogs I’ve come across - many of them, of course, admitted that they were not that interested in blogging anymore anyway, or something to that effect. For example, Grad Money Matters took a break for a few months before doing a couple of guest posts recently. She has 509 subscribers. Other blogs like Dividends Matter don’t update very frequently but still seem to rank high - is it because of the lingering effect of the traffic they once brought in? I’d like to hear your stories of other blogs you’ve noticed come and go - that is, blogs that once were really happening. Of course there are hundreds of blogs that get started but nothing happens to them at all.

It would be interesting to know if a similar fractal metric applies to the lifespans of blogs as it does to the lifespans of other new business start-ups. They say 5 years is a critical mark in small business. What about blogging? Is it 5 months? One other blogger said it was five months before she started bringing in income from her site. Of course, the income was not her purpose in the first place.

It will be interesting indeed to see how the future of finance blogs develops. You know, there are people doing their PhDs on this as we speak…