OT: So this is sports now. Sigh.

[BTTA]

My front page on the Athletic.
The lead story is about an athlete being arrested for a violent crime.
None of the four top stories are about a game that was played, and 3 of the 4 are about money and law.
Of the eight secondary stories, three are about injuries, two are about contracts, one is about a controversy with an award, and ONE is about an actual game played.

 

[AQPE]

Don’t mistake sports for “sports media.” The latter is about “clicks,” and sensationalism sells much better. Additionally, “sports reporting” is not what us old farts grew up with, when newspapers dominated and were able to manage content, allowing for editors to exercise judgment (for better and worse). Now with social media that filtering is gone and the clicks are paramount. Finally with the competition wide open, the talent level we grew up with in the media is gone, and negativity is a lot easier than insight

 

[Wozzy]

A bigger disgrace is the advent of celebrity or influencers becoming “athletes” and running these exhibition matches.

Recently RayJ, a guy who was famous for five seconds for being in a sextape with a Kardashian, competed in a celebrity boxing match. He assumed it was like all of Jake Paul’s boxing “fights” and the match was rigged to favor him. Unfortunately for him, his opponent didn’t stick to the script and knocked him the hell out. Afterwards he admitted all this and bemoaned the fact he placed bets on himself to win.

The long and short of it, these exhibitions are rigged and nobody should pay for them or bet on them. But it sure as sht ain’t sports.

 

[Steve102]

Don’t mistake sports for “sports media.” The latter is about “clicks,” and sensationalism sells much better. Additionally, “sports reporting” is not what us old farts grew up with, when newspapers dominated and were able to manage content, allowing for editors to exercise judgment (for better and worse). Now with social media that filtering is gone and the clicks are paramount. Finally with the competition wide open, the talent level we grew up with in the media is gone, and negativity is a lot easier than insight

Sports media in 2026 is about clicks. Bad news, sensational headlines, sex and violence will always outdo a random game.

 

[Ian]

Sports media in 2026 is about clicks. Bad news, sensational headlines, sex and violence will always outdo a random game.

What's going on in the AI/Search landscape is the root of this. These last 60 days have been absolutely brutal, with some of the changes that are happening being devastating to say the least to publishers, and obviously, the other media companies are feeling it. The Athletic runs off of subscriptions, but they also run off of ad revenue, which means that while they have revenue coming in from the subscriptions, they're likely hurting and can't fully weather the traffic drop off, so things go a bit beyond the normal long-form stories. You're sort of seeing it everywhere in that there's an increase in the sensational clicks and stories that tend to garner more reactions, and it's spilling across a large number of outlets.

Clickbait headlines exist because people aren't reading the articles without them. I have to do it here at times for the same reason, and it's irritating. You can write a researched article with information, and no one will click/read it with a normal headline.

It also doesn't help that AI is killing off search traffic, and Google's recent change over the last 5 days just nuked what little traffic most of us were getting. I'm not going to get into it any further because I've already whined enough about it, but it's bad. Like, shockingly bad. And I do think the internet in general is going to contract quite a bit due to all this because it won't be feasible to survive off ad revenue. There are only so many subscriptions people can afford, so it just is what it is. But I think what @BTTA is referring to is only going to get worse, not better. Unfortunately. It's just unreal.

 

[borg]

Keep it simple....
Turn on the TV one minute before a game starts, turn off the volume during halftime, turn off the TV when the final whistle blows.
Everything else is empty calories.
And of course, read PatsFans obsessively.

 

[Ian]

For those interested, this article sheds some light about what's going on:

Google Search AI Overhaul Leaves Publishers Bracing For ‘Google Zero’

Google’s new AI Search experience is triggering fears across the media industry that publishers could lose the traffic lifeline that’s sustained the web for decades.

www.forbes.com

 

[Ross12]

What's going on in the AI/Search landscape is the root of this. These last 60 days have been absolutely brutal, with some of the changes that are happening being devastating to say the least to publishers, and obviously, the other media companies are feeling it. The Athletic runs off of subscriptions, but they also run off of ad revenue, which means that while they have revenue coming in from the subscriptions, they're likely hurting and can't fully weather the traffic drop off, so things go a bit beyond the normal long-form stories. You're sort of seeing it everywhere in that there's an increase in the sensational clicks and stories that tend to garner more reactions, and it's spilling across a large number of outlets.

Clickbait headlines exist because people aren't reading the articles without them. I have to do it here at times for the same reason, and it's irritating. You can write a researched article with information, and no one will click/read it with a normal headline.

It also doesn't help that AI is killing off search traffic, and Google's recent change over the last 5 days just nuked what little traffic most of us were getting. I'm not going to get into it any further because I've already whined enough about it, but it's bad. Like, shockingly bad. And I do think the internet in general is going to contract quite a bit due to all this because it won't be feasible to survive off ad revenue. There are only so many subscriptions people can afford, so it just is what it is. But I think what @BTTA is referring to is only going to get worse, not better. Unfortunately. It's just unreal.

The part I don't understand is that it seems like some sort of Ouroboros situation - a snake eating its own tail. AI, which seems to slowly be getting dominated by Google at least on the consumer side, is cannibalizing the internet to feed its outputs.

However, by starving all of these outlets of clicks, they stop actually publishing useful information and instead publish misleading or outright incorrect information in order to generate traffic. This becomes pervasive, and the AI model eventually only has this data as the basis for its outputs, leading to serving incorrect information due to lack of anything else. Then at some point, the outlets just starve and die entirely and the AI models have nothing upon which to use. Then what?

 

[BennyBledsoe]

This is the internet that exists in the corporate mindset. NOTHING matters except that quarterly report. NOTHING.

Everything must ALWAYS expand.

Without more aggressive intervention by the government (this used to happen), companies are going to continue to merge in the name of efficiency. Monopolies are much more efficient.

Competition does not exist without proper regulatory protections.

And neither of our political parties here in the US has seen fit to put an end to this slow bastardization of quality for profit.

 

[Ian]

The part I don't understand is that it seems like some sort of Ouroboros situation - a snake eating its own tail. AI, which seems to slowly be getting dominated by Google at least on the consumer side, is cannibalizing the internet to feed its outputs.

This, 100%. Especially since the smaller publishers all use their ad network, which they obviously get a percentage of. But I'm sure they're caught on the other side of it, where ChatGPT ate so far into their search traffic that they're forced to adapt because they're also obviously interested in their own self-preservation.

 

[patman52]

Don’t mistake sports for “sports media.” The latter is about “clicks,” and sensationalism sells much better. Additionally, “sports reporting” is not what us old farts grew up with, when newspapers dominated and were able to manage content, allowing for editors to exercise judgment (for better and worse). Now with social media that filtering is gone and the clicks are paramount. Finally with the competition wide open, the talent level we grew up with in the media is gone, and negativity is a lot easier than insight

Agree with you on the hot takes that replaced what was. But the whole society now thinks everyone should now other peoples personel business. That should have stopped at the contract. Arrests are not considered personal. Talking about wives and girlfriends, orientation, political leanings is repugnant to me.

 

[Ross12]

This, 100%. Especially since the smaller publishers all use their ad network, which they obviously get a percentage of. But I'm sure they're caught on the other side of it, where ChatGPT ate so far into their search traffic that they're forced to adapt because they're also obviously interested in their own self-preservation.

The hopeless optimist in me sees a world where Google just does this long enough to kill OpenAI, then dismantles most of it and lets the wider internet breathe again. I'm sure that won't happen, but... hey... I guess it's possible.

 

[Ian]

The hopeless optimist in me sees a world where Google just does this long enough to kill OpenAI, then dismantles most of it and lets the wider internet breathe again. I'm sure that won't happen, but... hey... I guess it's possible.

Something will have to give. Because what became a sustainable hobby for a lot of people is being killed off in surprisingly quick fashion. I'm part of a group where I've seen a massive number of people who have either sold their sites or shut them down completely. The recent change highlighted in the Forbes article is the one that left most of us who remain really concerned.

 

[patfanken]

God this is perhaps the most depressing, yet true, thread I've ever read here. I was going to come here and complain about ESPN reporting on the WWE like it was a true sport and not a fixed cartoon. That seems a bit trivial right now. Given Trump and the destruction of Democracy, I'm REAL glad I'm a lot closer to the end than the beginning.

Here's hoping the Brown trade gets here soon so we can lose ourselves into all the ramifications of the deal and forget about what's ACTUALLY happening;

 

[Ian]

The hopeless optimist in me sees a world where Google just does this long enough to kill OpenAI, then dismantles most of it and lets the wider internet breathe again. I'm sure that won't happen, but... hey... I guess it's possible.

The other issue is the bot traffic, which has skyrocketed. I have a lot of it blocked via Cloudflare, but you can't block all of it completely in terms of being cited in AI results, which are minimal (single-digit/maybe double-digit [10-20]) referrals, but anything helps. Cloudflare is looking into a model where publishers would essentially opt into receiving a "crawl toll" that those AI companies would have to pay because the amount they hit the site in a given day is in the tens of thousands, despite virtually no return on that "traffic." They're just burning bandwidth/resources.

 

[Headcase]

My front page on the Athletic.
The lead story is about an athlete being arrested for a violent crime.
None of the four top stories are about a game that was played, and 3 of the 4 are about money and law.
Of the eight secondary stories, three are about injuries, two are about contracts, one is about a controversy with an award, and ONE is about an actual game played.

And you did exactly what they wanted, brought the stories somewhere else, and it is likely someone will go click on some of the stories.

Good job.

 

[Bill Lee]

This is the internet that exists in the corporate mindset. NOTHING matters except that quarterly report. NOTHING.

Everything must ALWAYS expand.

Without more aggressive intervention by the government (this used to happen), companies are going to continue to merge in the name of efficiency. Monopolies are much more efficient.

Competition does not exist without proper regulatory protections.

And neither of our political parties here in the US has seen fit to put an end to this slow bastardization of quality for profit.

That's because it's in both party's interest to let the CEOs and financiers to cash in as they let the businesses squeeze every penny out of the dollar and then watch them fail, because in the end it is money that elects politicians and it's corporations and financiers that provide that money.

A good recent example is Spirit Airlines. It had a good niche going for itself, but it had to chase that last penny on the dollar, and now they're gone. The people that benefit are the CEO who still got his severance payout and the lawyers and financiers that are handing the selloff of the assets.

 

[Bill Lee]

Something will have to give. Because what became a sustainable hobby for a lot of people is being killed off in surprisingly quick fashion. I'm part of a group where I've seen a massive number of people who have either sold their sites or shut them down completely. The recent change highlighted in the Forbes article is the one that left most of us who remain really concerned.

Thanks for the update. I do feel for you and the people like you that keep various sites like yours 'on the air'.

I am a supporter, and am willing to up my support level as needed, and I'm sure others will too.

I do see the 'too many subscriptions' problem, and hope we find a way around that.

I'm a fan of the pay-as-you-go model, but big business hates that.