Parasite is over and half of you are still paying rent on it

Final run of my eleven, eight months after the first table. Nothing bought or renewed in between, so this is decay rather than a portfolio.

Host type	n	Live and stable	Fell 50%+	Gone from index
Rented subfolder, bulk	4	0	0	4
Sponsored section, editor-reviewed	3	0	2	1
Single editorial page	4	2	2	0

Every row got worse. The middle row is effectively finished. The bottom row is now half down.

What I want to flag, because it cuts against the thread's assumption: two of my four single editorial pages are on hosts with no rental operation anywhere on the domain, and one of those two is among the ones that fell. So the contamination story explains some of it and not all of it.

My read, and it is a read: the whole category is losing value gradually and everyone is looking for a policy explanation for what might just be paid placements becoming worth less every year, the way every link type has since I started measuring anything.

Eight months, eleven URLs, one person's clients. Somebody with a hundred should be doing this instead of me.

That last paragraph is the most honest thing in the thread and it makes my March post look worse than the June update did.

I've stopped buying placements entirely as of last month. Not because I think category 3 is dead — two of mine are still fine — but because I can no longer tell a client what he's buying with a straight face, and that's the same test I applied to tier 2 two years ago and reached the same answer.

Depends what you're running. If you've got a placement that's held eighteen months, keep it and don't touch it. I wouldn't start now.

Anyway nobody in this thread bought anything in 2025. This is the answer.

Nine months and I'll plant the flag, because the thread has done the thing threads always do and drifted from whether to how.

What we have: eleven URLs measured properly by one man, four bulk rentals dead, three sponsored sections effectively dead, four editorial placements at fifty percent survival, one honest report from cashflowkid who lost his 1400, one broker who has stopped selling it, and a taxonomy that got revised twice on two cases each time.

What we don't have, in nine months, is a single person posting a placement bought in 2025 that is still performing in December. Not one. Everything anyone is defending was bought in 2023 or 2024 and is being defended on the grounds that it hasn't died yet.

That's the tell and it's always the tell. A tactic in its productive years produces people who bought in this year and are delighted. A tactic in its afterlife produces people managing legacy positions and calling it working.

I'll say the thing I always say. It didn't get harder. It stopped existing, and what's left is four people's inventory aging out.

Quote me in 2027 when it comes back with a new name.

nine months to arrive at your opening post mate

He didn't arrive at it. He waited at it.