1. The question started simple: “Does this kind of blog even have competitors?”
Take a trivial everyday event.
Make a joke about it.
Ask, “What is going on here?”
Search a little.
Somehow end up reading research papers.
Then return to the original joke with:
“Wait, that is actually a real mechanism?”
Are there established competitors for this kind of general-interest writing?
Yes, but not one clean category.
Omocoro and Daily Portal Z compete for the “turn ordinary life into entertaining reading” audience. Nazology competes for “make science and research fun for ordinary readers.” Experimental History is unusually close in spirit: a strange observation or question becomes a long, research-backed essay.
So the competitors exist.
Then you check how old they are.
Most of them are basically ancient trees.
2. This is not a rookie tournament
Public information as of September 1, 2026 looks roughly like this.
| Publication | Started | Approx. age | Public output | Current activity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omocoro | Oct. 23, 2005 | ~20 years 10 months | ~3,600 feature articles, ~4,200 four-panel comics, ~2,800 radio episodes | Updated every weekday |
| Daily Portal Z | Oct. 7, 2002 | ~23 years 11 months | More than 20,000 articles by 2024 | Still active in 2026 |
| Nazology | Articles visible from 2017 | ~9 years | Archive reaches page 949 | Multiple new items on active days |
| Experimental History | 2022 | ~4 years 8 months | 138 posts through Aug. 2026 | Roughly every other week |
Omocoro’s 2026 media guide reports about 3,600 feature articles, 4,200 four-panel comics, and 2,800 radio episodes. [1]
Daily Portal Z said in 2024 that it had published more than 20,000 articles. It published more than 1,300 pieces in 2023 alone. [3][4]
Nazology does not publish an exact lifetime article total, so it would be wrong to invent one. What is visible is an archive reaching page 949, with material going back to 2017 and multiple fresh items still appearing in 2026. [8][9]
At that point, “wow, these things have been active forever” is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
You begin with competitor analysis and end up counting tree rings.
3. But article volume is not a universal win condition
Experimental History breaks the pattern.
Its yearly sitemaps contain 138 posts from 2022 through August 2026. [10]-[14]
Not 20,000.
Not 3,600.
One hundred thirty-eight.
Yet Substack displays more than 98,000 subscribers, and the author says paid subscriptions allowed him to devote 100% of his working time to Experimental History. [15][16]
A third-party directory, Sidestack, lists more than 1,000 paid subscribers and prices of $10 per month or $100 per year. [17] That is not an official revenue disclosure, so actual income and profit are unknown. But it is enough to kill one bad assumption: you do not necessarily need thousands of posts to make writing a full-time job.
High-volume models can work.
Low-volume, high-loyalty models can work.
Article count is inventory. It is not, by itself, the reason readers return.
4. Display ads turn traffic into a gym routine
What does ordinary display-ad monetization look like?
Three Japanese personal blogs that publicly shared their own results provide useful real examples:
- About 13,000 pageviews and roughly ¥2,200 per month: about ¥0.17 per view. [18]
- 4,943 pageviews and ¥1,434 over 28 days: about ¥0.29 per view. [19]
- 218,884 pageviews and ¥52,586 across 2025: about ¥0.24 per view. [20]
These are examples, not an industry benchmark. Topic, geography, ad settings and season can change the result dramatically.
Still, mechanically applying the observed ¥0.17–¥0.29 range gives a useful thought experiment.
| Monthly pageviews | Illustrative display-ad revenue |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | ~¥1,700–¥2,900 |
| 100,000 | ~¥17,000–¥29,000 |
| 500,000 | ~¥85,000–¥145,000 |
| 1 million | ~¥170,000–¥290,000 |
| 5 million | ~¥850,000–¥1.45 million |
| 12 million | ~¥2.04–¥3.48 million |
Even one million monthly pageviews can still look like “strong side income” rather than an enormous media business if display ads are the only engine.
Traffic is hard to build.
The exchange booth is not especially generous.
5. Sponsorships and memberships change the game
Omocoro’s 2026 media guide reports about 12 million monthly pageviews and 2.53 million users. Its standard sponsored-article package starts at ¥1.7 million with 60,000 guaranteed pageviews; the boosted package is ¥3 million with 120,000 guaranteed pageviews. [1]
That price is not simply “the price of 60,000 pageviews.” It includes creative planning, writing, editing, production, brand value and social distribution.
But a deliberately crude comparison reveals the business-model difference.
At an illustrative ¥0.25 per display-ad pageview, generating ¥1.7 million would require about 6.8 million pageviews.
A branded publication can instead sell:
“Have this publication and these creators make something entertaining about your product.”
That is the jump from selling page impressions to selling the media brand itself.
Daily Portal Z shows another route. Around its 2023 independence, it disclosed recurring monthly revenue of roughly ¥1 million from banners and ¥1.5 million from memberships, against about ¥3 million in monthly costs. [5]
In 2024 it reduced monthly system costs from roughly ¥1 million to ¥200,000–¥300,000 and reported several consecutive profitable months, supported mainly by memberships and sponsored articles. [6][7]
The funny lesson is that twenty years of history did not automatically print money.
Changing the revenue structure and the cost structure mattered.
Business has entered the chat.
6. The scariest competitor may not be a blog
In 2026, Google itself competes with informational articles.
Ahrefs reported that for Japanese informational searches showing an AI-generated overview, the observed click-through rate for the number-one result was 9.0% in June 2026, versus a predicted 24.1% without the overview — a 62.7% reduction. [21]
So an article that is only:
“Does lack of sleep affect a health check?”
can potentially be compressed into a search-screen answer.
Google: “Sometimes, yes.”
Case closed.
But a piece that begins:
“I took a nap because I was sleepy. Now it is the middle of the night, I cannot sleep, and my health check is in the morning. How did we get here?”
loses much more when reduced to a one-line answer.
Narrative does not magically guarantee search traffic. But when factual answers are increasingly replaceable, experience, jokes, observations and the writing itself become part of the product.
The competitor search started with other publications.
The final boss turned out to be the search page.
7. Conclusion: do not grade a sapling against a 20-year-old tree
The most important number in this comparison is not revenue.
It is time.
Omocoro: about 21 years.
Daily Portal Z: about 24 years.
Nazology: about 9 years.
Experimental History: about 4 and a half years.
You can read that as intimidating competition.
Or you can read it as market proof that people will still return to entertaining general-interest writing after ten or twenty years.
And there is no single winning model.
Publish a lot.
Publish rarely but make every piece memorable.
Use ads.
Build memberships.
Sell creative sponsorships.
Grow direct and branded traffic.
They are different games.
So before asking, “How much is that competitor making now?” ask another question first:
How long have they been standing there?
If competitor research produces an ancient tree, comparing its height with a sapling and saying “we are losing” is technically correct.
It is also a very silly measurement.
