The State of The Noonion: Blogging Our Way Through the AI Boom

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: From 2016 to 2026, HackerNoon's transformed from a site built atop an unreliable CMS to a resilient, profitable publishing platform with diversified revenue, owned distribution, and defensible infrastructure. We survived multiple tech cycles while compounding audience trust and pricing power. Q4 2025 revenue hit $727k—our strongest quarter ever—breaking through after five years at ~$1M annually, driven by Business Blogging's 62% CAGR and 9% operating expense decline with AWS as our top customer, alongside 4.4M monthly pageviews. Our Editors, Editing Protocol, GPTZero partnership and Second Human Rule differentiate us as AI content pollutes the web, while Ahrefs ranks us as a top 2.8k site in the world. 2026 projects as our best year yet!

Read the full Blog Post below for full context.

📈 Business Overview

2025 was the strongest financial year in HackerNoon’s history. While AI upended search economics, it also proved that our focus on quality and community was the right bet all along. Q4 2025 was a milestone, hitting a record $727k in revenue and finally breaking through the ~$1M annual revenue plateau we had maintained for the last five years. This breakthrough was driven by the 62% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate from 2019 to 2025) on our Business Blogging engine and a 9% YoY reduction in operating expenses, with AWS anchored as our top customer. This growth is underpinned by our continued publication of high-quality tech blog posts, such as The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting, Stop Using the Wrong Database for the Right Problem, Elaborate Hoaxes in the Age of AI, & The Boredom Paradox: How Risk-Averse Engineering Built the Internet's Most Resilient Companies.

From 2016 to 2026, HackerNoon transformed from a site built atop an unreliable CMS, to a risky platform migration project, to now a resilient, profitable publishing platform with diversified revenue, owned distribution, and defensible infrastructure. We survived multiple tech cycles while compounding audience trust and pricing power. A decade of HackerNoon.com complete, we are now focused on the next ten years.\

While AI continues to eat search traffic; our owned audience, strong brand name recognition, and increased demand for business blogging position us well for continued growth in 2026 and beyond. Our 2026 roadmap focuses on accelerating Business Blogging revenue while maintaining profitability.

📈 2025 Traffic & Editorial: AI is Here Whether or Not We Like It

HackerNoon.com traffic in 2025 reflected a transitional year for the broader internet as AI reshaped discovery and search behavior. We started 2025 strong and closed even stronger. By Q4, HackerNoon.com traffic averaged 4.4M monthly pageviews, while our 500+ learning hub network generated an additional 1M+ monthly views. This late-year surge signals powerful momentum heading into 2026. According to Profound, the AI chatbot traffic analysis tool that we partner with, HackerNoon's overall visibility in AI-generated answers across major US models rose by 8.3% from June 2025 to January 2026, moving us to a 20th place ranking among developer-focused platforms. Our citation share for hackernoon.com increased steadily, peaking above 6% daily in January 2026, more than double its average from mid-2025. Top cited content in these AI responses centered on software development, business blogging and developer marketing, which align well with our editorial verticals.

Visit HackerNoon.ai for a thorough walkthrough of all our AI-related efforts, and timeline. We’ve published 15k+ blogs posts about AI, integrated AI across our publishing platform, and are making an early stage network of introductory machine learning tools (such as Turing Test and Computational). On top of this, the site offers a comprehensive searchable database of the Internet's Best AI Software and Compute Grants and Credits.

The Human MOAT

Editorial quality remains one of HackerNoon’s strongest long-term moats. In 2025, our Ahrefs domain rank is 2,860 in the world. Now outperforming major global brands including McDonalds.com, Deepseek.com, BritishCouncil.org, Windows.com and Cursor.com. This reflects our tech authority, content quality, and evergreen approach compounding over time.

In December of 2025, we officially announced our partnership with GPT Zero, an AI detection tool that scans and labels AI-generated content with highest degree of accuracy according to industry benchmarks. This partnership is our effort to emphasize AI transparency and preserve what’s human in content publishing. In full alignment with our long-standing Editing Protocol, the Second Human Rule requires staff-editor review of every article and spotlights original writing. In an internet polluted and overwhelmed by AI generated content, this philosophy has served as our category-level differentiator.

HackerNoon's distributed publishing network exceeds 1M visitors per month. Some notable sites include Escholar, Dataology, Public Domain, Text Models, Bitcoin Paper Tech, Halving Tech, Few Shot, Browserology, Tech Hyperbole, and Tech News Byte. With our in-house CMS, content from HackerNoon.com gets populated to these satellite sites, garnering more traffic and audience every day.

💰2025 Revenue: The Year of Business Blogging

After five consecutive years of hovering slightly above the $1M mark in annual revenue, Q4 2025 finally broke through with a $727k revenue, making us cautiously optimistic about the road ahead. Specifically, we are optimistic about business blogging, and cautious about advertising.\

Business Blogging (formerly, Brand-as-author) is the star of the show. This is where brands pay to publish their blog posts on HackerNoon, including but not limited to Corporate Blogs, Technical Posts, Product Announcements, Press Releases, Industry Trends & Reports, Interviews, and more company owned content. In 2025, Business Blogging saw increased demand both from direct buyers (tech companies like InDrive and Moonlock) and from resellers (marketing firms like Chainwire and Blockman).

As shown in the graph above, from 2019 to 2025, HackerNoon’s business blogging revenue grew from $36K to $651K, representing a ~62% compound annual growth rate over six years. Growth materially accelerated in 2024, with revenue increasing by $256K (+139% YoY), followed by continued expansion in 2025 with an additional $211K of net new revenue (+48% YoY). Over the past two years alone, the business added $467K in incremental annualized revenue, exceeding the cumulative growth of the prior four years combined. This demonstrates a durable, scalable revenue engine without increasing operating expenses.

Total ads—on site and newsletter—experienced a 20% YoY decline, as advertisers and brands navigate the new AI internet landscape. However, our largest customer was AWS, who bought out all our site and newsletter ads for the last 2 months of 2025. Overall our ad packages are moving toward less customers with larger deal sizes. The larger the tech company, the more beneficial they find advertising— they value gaining share of voice for niche technologies. The smaller the company, the more they expect immediate and residual conversions, which makes business blogging a better value purchase for them. Business Blogging delivers value because it leverages all the publishing software we’ve built to make HackerNoon what it is today, such as: story pages that load fast worldwide, human editor messaging, model-assisted editing with mandatory human review, blog post translation into (almost) any language, blog post modification into a variety of AI voices and podcast feeds, trigger-based emails, blockchain backups, and more.

Blogging Contests empower businesses to earn community validation through multiple contributor voices (unlike Business Blogging where businesses publish directly) while we reward writers with cash prizes. In 2025 our largest blogging contests were Spacecoin, Web3 Development, and Blockchain Contests. However total blogging contest revenue dropped 41% YoY. This was a clear signal for us to rethink the OG Writing Contests model.

The rethink: bundle multiple smaller contests under bigger technical themes. More revenue, higher stakes, bigger rewards, and more impact on the technical terms that HackerNoon thinks will emerge. For 2026, we're treating each contest like a long remote tech hackathon and securing multiple major sponsors before each launch. The first two of 2026 are Proof of Usefulness and Decentralize AI.

Proof of Usefulness launched in early 2026 with Algolia, Neo4j, Storyblok, and Bright Data sponsoring. Over $150k in cash prizes and software credits for individual projects and startups building real-world value. Traditional blogging contests aren't going anywhere, but Proof of Usefulness shows the promise of how the new model works—bigger themes, better outcomes.

HackerNoon also takes on official sponsors for integrated solutions with our own publishing platform. For the third year in a row, we renewed with Algolia as our site search technology. And added Sia as our P2P content backup system and GPT Zero as our AI detection partner. Integrated partners get validation and adoption from our audience and we get stronger infrastructure and proven tech. These approaches play into our long held instincts about accreditation as advertisement.

Not only did we increase year-over-year revenue by 20%, we also reduced operating expenses by 9%. We achieved this by scaling team capabilities (AI ftw!) rather than headcount, cutting email delivery costs by 29% through optimization of our existing provider (Elastic), reducing spend on productivity tools (Notion, Google) by prioritizing lower-cost alternatives & consolidating seats, and replacing 3rd-party software (Wix, Squarespace) with in-house solutions. 2026 expense trajectory shows a continued downward trend, with us doubling down cost-cutting and asking the question: Does this add long-term value to our business?

🚀 2025 HackerNoon Product Development: An Intelligent and Maturing Technical Publishing Platform

Product meetings are the longest meetings at HackerNoon. That is to say, we are builders first and foremost. Our objective is to be the blogging destination for people building technology. Below are some highlights of HackerNoon.tech milestones:

Expanded Translation, Story Boosts, and more Publishing Add-Ons for Business Blogging

Expanded language translation options (76+), audio distribution, blockchain backups, newsletter boosts, and enhanced homepage promo features in the Business Blogging program. Prospective clients can customize their package how they wish.

Revamp of Business Dot

The microsite about our business offerings and the initial logged in business experience were a bit disjoined. We removed Squarespace from the experience, and made purchasing possible on business dot HackerNoon pages and as services within all of HackerNoon dotcom.

Chowa Editor (Co-authorship & Enhanced Writing Tools)

A win for collaborative writing! Chowa ( (調和 / ちょうわ, chōwa) is a Japanese word for harmonic alignment. This smart editor widget allows writers to invite other writers to co-author their blog posts, view/accept AI enhancements, insert graphics/charts, and more.

Blogging Templates Library

With improved layouts and filters, bloggers can easily access our library of hundreds writing templates that have worked for past campaigns and posts.

Startups of the Year!

In April, we announced the winners by city and by industry. The campaign totalled 4.3M tech community votes. In 2026 Q2, voting will reopen for Startups of Year 2026-2027 with a redesigned experience—smoother voting, substantial prizes, and tens of thousands of new startups competing.

SeriesA.tech, SeriesB.tech, SeriesC.tech, and SeedFunding.tech

We made this group of sister sites where AI curates, parses, and publishes funding news. Qualifying funding news updates trigger the creation of HackerNoon company news pages, and we use these updates in our outreach to recruit more quality blog content and business blogging customers.

HackerNoon Courses (self-paced learning for builders, with specific AI modules)

The first course launched was HackerNoon’s owned Blogging Course. It is our attempt to turn our decade of publishing and editorial knowledge into structured, self-paced learning experiences for developers, founders, and aspiring technical writers. Users pay for the course, go through each of the modules, answer quizzes and submit assignments, and in the end receive a certificate of completion.

Proof-of-usefulness Hackathon

In the first week of 2026 we launched Proof of usefulness (POU), a hybrid scoring hackathon and blogging contest that evaluates projects based on real-world impact rather than demos or hype. At its core is a proprietary scoring algorithm that weights measurable signals such as real usage, technical depth, sustainability, distribution reach, and evidence quality to generate an objective “Proof of Usefulness Report.” Upon generation of a POU report, aspiring contest participants gain official entrance into the contest by moving their detailed scoring report into a HackerNoon blog post. Our sponsors Bright Data, Algolia, Neo4J, and StoryBlok are committed to giving away $150k+ total ($20k in cash, $130k+ in software credits) for this 6-month-long contest in both prizes and software credits.

Pick Your Automated Audio Narration & Translation Languages

Bloggers select their preferred AI voice for audio narration and reach global audiences through 76 language translations. Author-controlled sound, automated audio distribution to podcast feeds too.

Platform-Wide UI/UX Refresh

A cleaner homepage, optimized navigation, and smarter content discovery layers rolled out through the year, scaling our effort to synchronize all front-end developments using the Tailwind framework. Continuous improvement is the point: lighter code, trustworthy features, a platform that gets better every day.

30k+ Downloads on the Pixel Icon Library

This open-sourced library of over 1400+ pixelated icons (Github, Figma, NPM) was designed in-house and open sourced. It’s in use by Hacktoberfest, DevOps Days, Iconify, Pixel UI, Coat Rack Icons, Snake Eater UI, IconBuddy, Shadcn.io, and of course, HackerNoon. \

70 of our favorite 2025 HackerNoon blogs posts:

Ten years in, business blogging is our growth engine, editorial standards are our competitive moat, and our tech credibility compounds daily. We're focused on what works, disciplined on expenses, and grateful we get to work on HackerNoon.

How we can help you/you can help us:

A published blog post on HackerNoon goes a long way. Personal stories are free forever. Publish your story with HackerNoon today.
Interested in obtaining your company/project’s Proof of Usefulness score? Submit your project URL today for a free report. You can then submit the report as a HackerNoon Blog Post to enter the contest for the cash prize & software credits.
Refer a customer. Just reply to this newsletter or book a meeting.

Kind Regards,

CEO David Smooke and COO Linh Dao Smooke

P.S. Read our previous shareholder letter, State of the Noonion 2025: Scaling Business Blogging and The Technology Publishing Network, and past newsletters at Noonion.tech. If seeking more regular updates from HackerNoon, I recommend subscribing to the hackernoon.tech, and/or the #hackernoon tag.

P.P.S. Here are some notable coverage about HackerNoon around the web from Jan 1. 2025 until now: