"aAyYyee yOoOooO Luigi!"

ive gotten three requests for aroace prowl so this is for all of you 🫵

Let's make the sparklings even MORE terrifying by basing them off hexbugs.

Mix tape mission log, jazz build a musical pay wall.

Mix tape mission log, jazz build a musical pay wall.

Welp. I knew it was coming, but my corporate blogging job is officially over. My agency is... not dead yet, but it's dying. Like, it's on life support. I don't think it's gonna be around at the end of the quarter. It's 1 AM and I should have been in bed an hour ago because I have a big day taking interns into the field tomorrow, but I want to eulogize the end of an era.

At our peak, we really did operate a marketing agency- we had editors with authors beneath them, we had well over 200 clients, and it felt like this was gonna be a sustainable side hustle forever. At our heyday, I was pulling in an average of 600 a week; my best week ever I made about 1300 from what was really just a part time job I did at night.

And it was fun! We had a really vibrant work slack, I had great relationships with my editors, and we posted all kinds of goofy stuff. I had some really great clients in industries I knew nothing about, but that was ok, because I could learn.

And learn I did! I'm not going to outright name my clients but if you've ever been on a major perfume review site or bought any luxuriously-formulated vintage-inspired victory red lipstick or prepped with the experts for your SAT, you may have seen my writing. If you're a gen z fashionista and you've ever wondered why every single article that includes shorts on a very popular fashion website includes a line about how they're comfy and easy to wear, that was me.

I haven't been a freelancer long; I started in early 2022, when I wanted to pick up extra money because I knew I wasn't going to get summer funding. My first client was a fly fishing website. I knew nothing about fly fishing, but there I was, doing gear reviews based on videos he sent me of setting up tents in his backyard and writing about fish ethology. I remember when ChatGPT came out in November of that year and we were all "oh, this thing sucks, it's a flash in the pan, it's not gonna hurt us." And then it just never left.

At first, my firm made it a selling point- human-crafted words for your boutique needs. But then ChatGPT got better and SEO got harder. We tried to pivot. We started an AI branch. (My clients never took the option, they wanted me. My words.)

The problem, of course, became price. I went from around 10 regular clients to 4, to 2. And as of this weekend, it is zero, because my company has simply run out of money to pay the authors because they've had to discount so much to keep our clients.

As of Monday, the one founder left and the guy who bought the company are going to be basically the only writers left- and I know they're not actually paying out by word. They're just changing the parameters of their job descriptions to give themselves more work for no additional pay. This is not sustainable. There are a couple more- three, I think. I'm fairly certain at least one is going to get the same conversation I did, where it was clear that they wanted me to step down without having to say it.

And I did, because this was freelance, always. Easy separation, just walk away. They offered to keep me on for our last high-volume client, but I bowed out because it really isn't worth it to me anymore- it would be 7,200 words a month, if that. At my peak, I was writing around 16,000 a week.

I burned out a few times, but they were always kind about it, always helped get me back on track. I can tell the conversations are breaking their hearts. I'm worried about them, because this was always a side hustle for me- but for some of them, it was real. It was everything.

And I'm fine, I have a real job now that I love and they love what I do, I'm not doing this to survive. And I never actually wanted to be in marketing as a career. It kept employment gaps off my resume and gave me something to chew on when I was struggling with my dissertation and it was never meant to be forever. I was planning on hanging on as long as my three favorite clients were still around.

As far as I know, two stayed with the company- one also dropped today because he couldn't afford to pay a writer anymore. AI isn't just killing us, it's killing his site, too.

Anyways, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. It was a thing I did, I made some nice money off of it that helped me through some otherwise completely unemployed summers, and now it's gone. It was dying anyways, and everybody I was really friends with who worked there was already let go.

The highs of my old job:

Free perfume and makeup

Helping people leave the Jehovah's Witnesses

Learning about fish

Seeing some of my legal clients on billboards, hell yeah I wrote for ambulance chasers.

The lows of my old job:

Writing for a law firm that turned out to be owned by the dad of two high school classmates- that was weird and we weren't sure if it was a conflict of interest or not

Christian entrepreneurs

Subsequently, learning about the woman in LA who recommends that you save money by buying a whole raw chicken on Monday, boiling it for two hours without any seasonings, and eating it and drinking the chicken water to save money- a direct quote from her: "I cannot justify spending 5.75 on a loaf of bread that will just go bad in a couple of days." She insisted that the chicken water was "broth." She gave explicit instruction to throw the bones away.

Because it's down to 5 people. It's 5 right now. The guy who bought the company, his wife, the one remaining founder, and two other writers.

What's far scarier... is that there are 7 clients left. There is always churn in marketing, so even though we said we had "hundreds" of clients what that really meant was had a group that had a lot of churn, a group that would contract with us for a project or two or a set amount of time, and then we had a core group of about 75 who'd signed on and stayed consistently. The last time we talked about that core group, it was before the attrition started, so this would have been back in early 2025.

Of those 75 original long term clients... there are 3.

We lost 96% of our clients and 95% of our staff in less than a year. We'd had attrition before that, we'd lost market space to AI, but it wasn't like this. Before 2025, our pivots were doing well. We leaned into the human-crafted boutique language, we abandoned our traditional SEO and worked on AI-optimization as soon as we realized what was happening to search. This isn't because of the AI models getting better; it's because the way people search the internet has been gutted.

Now it's bots writing material that's published by bots for other bots to read and then give you the bottiest material- or the material that's sponsored- when you search.

I know that industries die, I just never thought I'd get to experience that dying like this. It's horrible to watch because the casualties of this are people. I was one of the people on the freelance team who didn't want to be a writer or work in marketing/advertising. Most of them did want to work in this field, as did all of the editing and infrastructure staff.

Thundercracker is 100% an early 2010s tumblr boy

You know, every time I draw something stupid, I think to myself "surely I can't top this!" And then somehow I draw something even dumber