OT: So this is sports now. Sigh.

Ian said:

How Sam Altman fooled Sundar Pichai — and pushed Google into cannibalizing itself | Fortune

A former GE Energy director and veteran Washington Post and Fortune columnist argues that OpenAI's AI narrative panicked Google into systematically destroying its own business model — and that a reckoning is approaching.

fortune.com

@Ross12

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Headcase said:

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.

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Ian said:

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.

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Ian said:

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.

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BTTA said:

Ian, that was a useful article.
Also, as you know, up until just a few minutes ago, I've been operating with my phone on this site for the last few hours, so prone to error, and I'd intended this post for The Pub, but screwed that up. Apologies.

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