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State of the Noonion 2025: Scaling Business Blogging and The Technology Publishing Network

by State of the Noonion for HackerNoon ShareholdersJanuary 22nd, 2025

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Too Long; Didn't Read

Revenue is up, Business Blogging is now our top earner, expenses are down thanks to some smart streamlining, and we’ve expanded our network with a little help from AI. Audience growth? Looking great all around 🙂

featured image - State of the Noonion 2025: Scaling Business Blogging and The Technology Publishing Network

This is a public version of the HackerNoon shareholders' newsletter by CEO David Smooke and COO Linh Smooke sent to 1.3k shareholders.

TL;DR

YoY Revenue from 2023 to 2024 increased by 22%. Business Blogging overtook targeted ad placements and writing contests as our top source of revenue, seeing a YoY rise of 189%.
YoY Expenses from 2023 to 2024 decreased by 28%. We cut non-essential third party software, slightly reduced staff, and re-architectured towards a lower tech stack bill.
We joined Cloudflare's AI Workers Cohort (Cloudflare blog post) to expand our tech blogging network via $250k in cloud credits. Currently, 560 additional sites are powered by our community driven CMS (content management system), such as EditingProtocol.com, NewsByte.tech, and TextModels.tech.
YoY Audience Development, we’ve achieved healthy growth in all metrics as compared to 2023: 187+ million emails delivered (+30%) to 523k+ email subscribers (+151%), 85+ million pageviews (+65%) on hackernoon.com, 106k+ active users in writing app (+57.6%), and 709k+ community members across all major social media channels (+9.3%). Ahrefs, the top SEO software, ranks us as the 2,747th top domain in the world. For a more detailed look at our 2024 recap, check out HackerNoon Decoded, our version of the ‘Spotify’ Wrapped!

Read the full Blog Post below for full context.

💰Business Progress & Development

After five years of doubling revenue annually (2017–2021), we achieved consistent low-million revenue for three years (2022–2024) while expanding our tech blog library, enhancing publishing software, and growing our audience. In 2024, Business Blogging surpassed ads as our top revenue source with a 189% YoY increase, making blog posts central to our mission. In 2025, we’ll focus on accelerating revenue through Business Blogging while supporting ad placements and writing contests as secondary revenue streams.

Business Blogging primarily relies on the publishing software we’ve built to make HackerNoon what it is today, such as: story pages that load fast worldwide, human editor messaging, AI editor assistance, blog post translation into (almost) any language, audio file creation, trigger-based emails, blockchain backups, and more. Unlike running ads, where only one customer can occupy the space at a time—for example, if I sell it to Amazon, I can't sell it to Google — business blogging operates differently. If both Google and Amazon (and even divisions of Amazon) want us to publish and distribute their stories, we can easily accommodate them simultaneously, and we do 🙂. In this way, business blogging is closer to an unlimited resource.

More notable HackerNoon business developments in 2024:

HackerNoon’s Startups of the Year 2024 Kicks Off with Record-Breaking Engagement (announcement, standalone site for updates, and #startupsoftheyear tag): Half way in, the 3rd year annual campaign has reached millions of votes on 153.6k nominated startups across 2.9k cities and 98 industries. Startups of the Year 2024 is sponsored by Notion, Wellfound, Bright Data, Algolia, and HubSpot. Winners receive an interview on HackerNoon, an Evergreen Tech Company News page, and sponsor perks. Reflecting the technology industry requires a comprehensive tech company database. HackerNoon’s building a database that is open, reliable, and editable that will enable technologists to make informed decisions about which emerging startups to learn about, invest in, partner with, or even work for. Startups of The Year created tens of thousands of freemium company accounts, thousands of organic social media mentions, and scaled up our staff and community curated company database with verified and original data (like dynamic votes).

We joined Cloudflare’s AI Workers Cohort (also see their blog). This grants us $250k in cloud credits, reducing HackerNoon's operating costs and supporting the development of our RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) AI Librarian. Our custom CMS is currently powering 560 of our sites. Some examples are NewsByte.tech, Memeology.tech, TextModels.tech, Gamificiations.tech, Escholar.tech, LearnRepo.com, Homology.tech, Dataology.tech, Browserology.tech, HistoricalEmails.com, CoinWikis.com, Blog.Slogging.com, Noonion.tech, HackerNoon.tech, PublicDomain.tech, LegalPDF.tech, OpenDatasets.tech, Abstraction.tech, FewShot.tech, Diction.tech, Computational.tech, Editorialist.tech, Reinforcement.tech, and MediaBias.tech. In Q1 2025, these sites will deploy our upcoming RAG AI Librarian to help anyone learn any technology.

Businesses and individual writers can explore automated and recurring services via HackerNoon’s New Cart System, including Business Blogging publishing credits, Boost-Your-Story feature, multi-pack language translations, Startups of the Year special offers, Evergreen Tech Company News Pages, and more. This feature launched in Q4 2024 and we are now seeing daily purchases without talking to a staff member for these smaller upsells.

We introduced the Technology Press Release Business Blog Post as a way for companies to also publish their HackerNoon business blog posts as press releases on AP, Yahoo, Digital Journal, Benzinga, and other established wire services. This offering better serves our announcement, funding, milestone, and partnership type of business blog posts.

Here’s a list of some of our notable recent customers (fewer than 20 picked from over 4,500!) You can read about them in our new series Company of the Week & Startups of the Week.

🚀 CMS Product Updates and Releases

We publish more regular product releases and updates on https://hackernoon.tech.

Changing the world one blog post at a time, we are proud of these recent product developments to HackerNoon’s publishing platform.

MongoDB Is Our New Backend Home for All Story and business database content

We migrated from Firebase to MongoDB to optimize our high-traffic blogging network. Firebase’s read-based pricing made MongoDB’s model more efficient. Both being NoSQL databases, the transition involved converting Firebase's unconventional timestamps to standard datetime objects. MongoDB's server-side aggregation reduces data transfer and processing. As part of the MongoDBs Startup Program, we did not pay for MongoDB hosting in 2024. We still rely on Google Cloud Platform for authentication, translations, and AI integrations, but Firebase (GCP) now serves as a backup for content. In total we reduced our YoY GCP bill by 46%. MongoDB improves performance and efficiently handles complex queries, streamlining our infrastructure.

Revamped Story Pages

The story pages have been redesigned for improved readability, featuring enhanced sections like translations and TLDR summaries, along with playful pixelated icons for interactions, and a more accurate around the web section that highlights whenever an article is mentioned in a 3rd party website.

HackerNoon Translation Feature

HackerNoon now supports 77 languages with custom homepages, RSS feeds, and newsletters (/es, /ja, /zh, /fr, /pt, etc.), making it easier to discover and enjoy stories in your preferred language. Readers can seamlessly navigate, read, and subscribe to top stories in any supported language. Writers can pay to translate their stories into up to 77 languages, expanding their reach to a global audience. Translation as a service increases visibility, engagement, and keyword rankings across different languages, helping content gain worldwide traction.

New AI Editor

HackerNoon’s new AI Editor not only refines prose and formatting, but also recommends headlines that are more likely to trend based on HackerNoon’s past readership. Writers can simply highlight a sentence or paragraph, click the green robot icon, and choose from options like "Editor," "Format Code," or "Translate." The AI will generate a suggestion, which they can accept or modify. This feature makes content creation smoother and faster, enhancing one’s writing process without leaving the platform.

Mobile App Developments

Since launching, the HackerNoon mobile app has seen significant improvements across multiple updates. In version 2.03, we introduced Speech-to-Text for instant documentation and expanded our language options to over 70. Prior updates, such as 2.02, enriched search by ranking companies using our Evergreen Index, and versions 2.00-2.01 brought enhanced mobile writing features, polling data, and faster authentication. Check out our full release notes for more.

Emoji Credibility Indicators are Live on Figma and Github

Our open-source pixelated emoji pack was designed to communicate context about a story's content on HackerNoon and you can be amongst the first to try them! On Figma, our beloved pixel icon library is in use by 4.7k+ community members.

By simply being logged into Google, users can sign up or log in with just one tap. This means more users log in. If you don’t have a Google account, the regular signup flow is still available.

Top Technology Writers Rankings

The latest evolution of HackerNoon's Top Writers ranking is now a dedicated page highlighting each of our Tech Categories, showcasing the most prolific contributors with their profiles, bios, and rankings. The list is updated daily and emailed to niche subscribers, allowing readers to easily discover top writers and stay current with emerging voices. For writers, it’s an opportunity to gain visibility and attract followers.

Auto Posting on Socials

For writers, we introduce Auto Posting All New HackerNoon Blogs Via API On Threads, BlueSky, Twitter/X, BlueSky, Mastodon, Flipboard and as Always RSS too. We are continuing to explore more ways to auto post relevant content to social networks and niche communities.

Enhanced Stats Pages

The latest update to HackerNoon’s story stats pages introduces a larger graph showing total reader time, trends, and rankings. Additional data includes total reads, words written, days live, and story translations. Interaction tables now display recent comments and reactions. Profile stats have also been enhanced, showing total reading time, story counts, and subscribers. New newsletter stats include delivery data and email engagement, with all data available for export.

Updated Profile Pages

Profile pages got a fresh look. Now, readers can easily find the "Learn more about this author" button right under the bio, and the "Subscribe To This Writer" button just below the general stats, followed by CTAs. One can also reorganize stories by latest or most popular, pin their favorites, and see all essential story stats in the story cards, including tags, reads, reactions, and comments. The comments section now looks sleeker and cleaner, while still providing all the essential information. Plus, there’s the work section, where writers can showcase all their current and past job experiences.

One-stop-shop for readers to subscribe to all newsletters. The page features five newsletters: the daily HackerNoon Newsletter, Tech What The Heck, Product Updates, Hack Marketing, and Dear HackerNoon Writers. Each newsletter has its own dedicated section where writers can explore content, sign up for previews, and read user reviews.

Introducing the HackerNoon Inbox

We’ve enhanced our messaging system to streamline communication between editors and writers. This feature allows users to send messages directly from draft settings, keeping all conversations organized and easily accessible. The update includes color-coded messages, threaded replies, infinite scrolling, and mobile first UI. With added options to edit and delete messages and access Help and FAQs, this update offers a more efficient, real-time, app-like experience for draft collaboration.

HackerNoon’s AI Image Gallery Got a Makeover

Our AI Image Gallery has been redesigned for a better user experience. Now users can browse AI image sorting via chronological clustering and model used to create. Additionally, trusted users can create their own images by selecting "Try text to image" and experimenting with models like Stable Diffusion, Flux, and Kandinsky.

Pixelated Avatars (announcement post & live demo)

Users can create custom pixelated avatars for their profiles, bringing a fun, personal touch to their HackerNoon experience.This new feature adds a fun, creative element to their HackerNoon experience and helps one’s profile stand out.

Tag Pages Update

HackerNoon’s tag pages (announcement post, examples: #blockchain, #programming, and #machine-learning) have received a major update for the first time in 5 years. The new Tag Index Page offers over 88,000 tags, with features like "Most Used," "Trending," and "Last Published" tags, each showing story counts and descriptions. Individual tag pages now include user testimonials, banner images, and a search bar for sub-tags. Readers can also filter results by "Most Read" or "Most Recent." Discovering trending tech content has never been easier with these enhancements.

Digital publishing is evolving, and so are we. With HackerNoon’s community driven CMS, AI-assisted editing, multilingual translations, and integrated distribution, we’re creating a higher standard in tech blogging for individuals and companies.

📈 Editorial Direction, Audience Development, and Internet Mentions

We’re back on Wikipedia after being deleted a couple times. Don’t know why we were deleted. Wikipedia not only gets 4B+ visitors a month (half the planet lol), but it also populates search, apps, knowledge graphs, AI training, and more. HackerNoon’s Wikipedia is pictured below. I find it to be fair and direct. I like how the editor mentions us as a part of Hacker Culture.

As mentioned above, we’ve achieved healthy growth in all metrics as compared to 2023 YoY:

187+ million emails delivered (+30%) to 523k+ email subscribers (+151%). Notably, we reduced the cost of email by 30% with our migration from Sendgrid to Elastic Email!

85+ million pageviews (+65%) on hackernoon.com and 106k+ active users in app (+57.6%): our advantage against the barrage of AI-generated content from the rest of the Google-dependent internet is our human-curated process. Since every single story published on HackerNoon is reviewed, fact-checked, edited and improved by a human editor, we’ve largely avoided the AI content apocalypse.
Ahrefs, the top seo software, ranks us as the 2,747th domain in the world based on backlink strength (while Ahrefs added a login wall to see The Ahrefs Ranking, but it’s still free to view here). For the past two years, HackerNoon has consistently ranked among the top 3k domains globally. Right now, we sit just above public companies like Rumble, ServiceNow, DocuSign, and CrowdStrike, and just below well-established digital giants like GQ, Esquire, BHG, and Kaggle.

We are up 709k+ community members across our social media channels (+9.3%): as a publishing company, we’ve relied largely on direct traffic to HackerNoon while engaged equally in most major social media platforms, without growing too overly attached to any one of them. For a full list of all our social media presence, visit this page.

For a more detailed look at our 2024 recap, check out HackerNoon Decoded, our version of the ‘Spotify’ Wrapped! ‘

To summarize the year from a technology perspective, we’ll conclude this with 85 of our favorite HackerNoon blog posts from 2024!

“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence,” - Author Jim Watkins.

Builders can’t just force the future into existence, they make it through the steady application of innovation, effort, and resilience. Over time, our small, deliberate, and intelligent acts of improvement will lead to transformation.

Kind Regards,

CEO David Smooke and COO Linh Dao Smooke

P.S. Read our previous shareholder letter, State of the Noonion 2024: HackerNoon Keeps on Blogging, and past newsletters at Noonion.tech. If seeking more regular updates from HackerNoon, I recommend subscribing to the #hackernoon-product tag, hackernoon.tech, and/or the #hackernoon tag.

P.P.S. Here are some recent news coverage about HackerNoon around the web: