I've been quietly running a small network of niche content sites for a few weeks. Two are live on real domains:
- afixu.com - home improvement and DIY tool guides
- aceju.com - weekly AI tool awards, editorial format scored across 4 criteria
The niche isn't the interesting part. The pipeline is.
The LLM router
Instead of one model for everything, a router picks per article type:
- premium/commercial pieces go to a stronger model
- high-volume informational drafts go to a cheaper, faster one
- if a provider is rate-limited, it falls through a cascade so generation never stalls
The QA loop
Every draft, before it ships, passes through:
- an anti-AI-tells cleanup (80+ regex replacements - "delve", "leverage", "robust", etc.)
- a rankability judge scoring depth, specificity, intent-match and trust on an 8-point scale
- a structure/schema check (FAQ block, JSON-LD, internal links)
A daily job re-scores everything published in the last 24h and auto-regenerates the failures. The whole thing is Next.js 16 + MDX, one git repo per site.
The honest target: a $30k/mo run-rate in ~24 months across 30 mature sites, monetized through guest-link sales, not ads. Slow on purpose.
Happy to go deeper on the router logic or the QA scoring if anyone's interested.