Teardown

A 240-post archive with clean typography and no email capture above the fold on any of its top ten entry pages. The craft is already paid for. The conversion layer was never built.

Strong tag hubs doing real discovery work. The sponsorship slot is priced well under comparable inventory, which is the cheapest point on the board.

Everything rents the platform. The writing is good and none of it compounds into anything the author owns.

The best craft score in the set to date. Compounding is held back by a flat archive with no hub pages above the post level.

Fast, well built, and technically clean. Nothing on the site asks the reader for anything at any point.

Good writing buried under a search-only navigation. There is no browsable path into the archive.

The lowest composite scored to date. Publishes often and keeps almost none of what it earns.

The highest composite scored to date. The hub pages do the heavy lifting and everything else follows from them.

Discovery is solved. Craft is the cheapest remaining point on the board and would lift two other dimensions with it.

Even scores across the board with no single weak dimension, which is rarer than it sounds and harder to improve.