The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.

The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.

The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.

The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.

The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?

This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.

I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.

Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."

I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.

I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.

  1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC.

  2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone, and future knowledge (including that fed into LLMs) will degrade compared to a universe that kept this incentive alive

  3. AI is hardware, energy and R&D intensive and VCs will need a business model to recuperate their investments and costs, a key-player has already announced an ad model re-creating part of the issue noted previously that we temporarily resolved

https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...

Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

>While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.

(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)

1. Is there still value in a trusted source of high quality, relevant information existing in an easily accessible place? To me the answer is obviously yes, whether a human writes it or an agent, and also whether a human consumes it or an agent

2. If an agent visits a page, they shouldn't generate ad revenue (I guess they don't? is that true?). Should they just be able to copy the information for free? If the answer to 1. is yes, the answer here should probably be no.

3. Does this completely break the ad revenue model that powers like the whole internet?

4. Does this seriously threaten our ability to maintain a high quality, shared collection of knowledge? What can be done?

The above refers to the time until Jan 2026. Here are its financials:

  Year   Total Revenue   Operating Expenses   Net Income
  2025   $836.6          ~$708.0              $48.7
  2024   $687.6          $614.7               $30.4
  2023   $599.4          $541.8               ($11.8)
  2022   $538.9          $518.1               ($10.2)
  2021   $379.6          $390.1               ($42.5)

That being said, I am morbidly curious about traffic from RSS subscribers: has that gone up, gone down, or remained roughly the same in the same time period?

I guess the future model is, LLMs pay for raw data and news to ingest and use on demand, and ignore the "free" internet. That seems like a good landing point, where quality info is rewarded and cheap spin is not. Of course cheap spin will continue to be produced, but hopefully won't be baked into the system.

I use to be able to quickly discard the top few SEO results, but now its all SEO results for pages, and none of them contain anything besides the barest of surface details to be essentially worthless.

As an example try googling about what trees can be grafted to cherry trees. It is one of the easiest trees to graft requiring no special tools and multiple different species of fruit trees will graft onto cherry tree stock. And yet how many of those other species do you find listed or mentioned int he first 10 results? It is just generic slop about "Yes trees can be grafted, take Species A stick and slice into Species A tree, blah blah blah 14 pages of the same thing repeated" except they just replaced Species A with cherry, and if you google any other tree grafting it is the same article just with pear or apple or apricot, nothing about it is specific to cherry tree grafting or cross-species grafting.

Who knew!

The LLMs will aggregate knowledge until that knowledge becomes useless to us. Then the LLMs will become near to useless for us because they lack that new info. Then the traffic generally on the internet will wane and this multi-decade distraction will pass into history to be replace and/or augmented to create something new that serves our purposes at that time.

The need for communication doesn't go away. The need for this particular iteration of networked telecommunications + dark-pattern-laden social media doesn't even exist in the first place, except to the social network owners. It too shall pass.

cut the cookies and tracking, so you don't have to have a ridiculous compliance banner. cut the paywall that tells me what you had to say wasn't important enough for public consumption. cut the full screen ad breaks and page takeover nonsense.

these outlets have had years (decades?) to figure out how to monetize content that didn't drive users away. they have failed over and over and over again, so why should I care that they are failing now? if it wasn't AI, it would be something else that came for them. if you rely on the captiveness of your audience, rather than the quality of your product, I'm always happy to see you destroyed. whatever comes next will be different, at the very least. and I'm an optimist - I'll always hope that it's a better way. if it's not, let that shit die, too.

regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.

the rest are ad scams

I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.

My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.

That parasite of a site still seems to rank high for many search queries, even tho their user experience is horrible (and their content too)