If you’re following the AI story, it’s a shitshow for small publishers.
I urge you to follow two Twitter accounts: @barryschwartz and @glenngabe. They keep track of the traffic on the internet.
Yesterday, G/O Media threw in the towel. All their sites are gone or sold off. They couldn’t generate web traffic anymore.
Google often institutes “core updates.” This is PR-speak “we’ve changed the algorithm so no one can find you.”
Around March 1st, as AI came in, traffic went off a cliff for most publishers. It has not and will not return. Last month, Google added an AI choice to their search engine.
The way AI affects publishers is that when you search any term — from “cancer” to “Kim Kardashian” — AI presents you with their own answer drawn from websites but lacking links.
The blue links that take you to websites like this one have been pushed all the way down on the page and made irrelevant. Some people still flip through the blue links, but mostly the AI answer seems to satisfy curiosity.
Read here how “no clicks” has grown to 69% of Google search from 56%. By the time the Google lawsuits are sorted out, it won’t matter to publishers whose businesses have been destroyed.
It’s not just Google, by the way. It all search engines. Donald Trump should be thrilled: AI will wipe out individual honest, subjective reporting and replace it with one voice. Of course, among the many problems there is that AI is wrong most of the time. And there’s no way of correcting it.
The new Google core update was announced a couple of days ago. In reality, it started around 10 days ago. Traffic to sites has been destroyed as Google has started promoting their AI function right on the page. Of course, one downside for them is that they will need fewer and fewer workers to help index sites because they’ll all be wiped out. But soon Google will be down to around 8 people sitting in a room in Mountainview, California laughing at all of us.
Every so often I email a Google exec involved with search. I met her about 8 years at a cocktail party in Los Angeles. She hasn’t returned one message in 7 years. It’s impossible to speak to anyone at Google, they are walled off from the world. One guy, named John Mueller, is supposedly their liaison via Twitter. But he’s just a cheerleader for the company.
It’s a bad time. A PEW study last week said readers who get to sites with paywalls just go away. Only 1% sign up for subscriptions. A lot of writers have Substack accounts but it’s unclear how many actual subscribers they have or what revenue they generate.
Some sites — like this one — have DONATE buttons if readers want to chip in. Without public help, even with advertising (and not Google Adsense, which also trying to shut out publishers), the party is over.
Happy fourth of July!
