It’s Time to Say Goodbye
By Julien Brault | Published on 15 Aug 2024
It is with a heavy heart that I write this last post for Hardbacon.
Indeed, all employees of Hardbacon (Bacon Financial Technologies Inc.) have been let go, and our operations are now suspended.
The company will declare bankruptcy in the coming days, and it is possible that third parties may purchase some of our assets from the trustee.
If that happens, Hardbacon might have a second life. At least, I hope so, because it would be a shame for our app, our thousands of articles, and our calculators (which have become impossible to find on the web) to become completely inaccessible.
The app and the website are still functional at the time of writing, but it is possible that the trustee will stop paying for hosting, and the app and/or the website may cease to function in the coming weeks.
I am truly sorry that we have come to this, but please know that I did everything in my power to avoid what ultimately became inevitable.
I did everything I could to reduce expenses starting in September 2023, when a Google update caused Hardbacon’s traffic to plummet. I let go of our employees one by one until I had to let go of the last two employees at the beginning of the month.
Despite extensive SEO and content optimization work, our traffic continued to decline, and each Google update since September has accelerated our traffic loss, without any clear explanation.
In total, we lost 97% of our traffic from Google. This means our traffic went from 350,000 per month in September to around 50,000 per month at the time of writing.
Thousands of websites were impacted, but sites with affiliate links like Hardbacon were particularly hit, obviously because we are direct competitors to Google Ads. Indeed, publishers like us allow their clients to run online advertising campaigns knowing exactly what their return on investment is.
Of course, the fact that Google lost its monopoly abuse case in the United States and that many similar cases are pending suggests that Google might lose ground due to its abusive behavior.
That said, it is too late for Hardbacon.
