If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience.
If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.
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.
If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?
Yea so I’ve had an issue getting video output after boot on a new AMD R9700 Pro. None of the, albeit free, models from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic have really been helpful. I found the pro drivers myself. They never mentioned them.
Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.
Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:
> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.
This then becomes the hardware manufacturers problem. If their new hardware fails for to many users it will no longer be purchased. If they externalize their problem solving like so many companies, they won't be able to gain market share.
This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.
Right, that success story is only because there was "organic" (for lack of a better term) information from an original source. What happens when all information is nth generation AI feedback with all links to the original source lost?
Edit: A question from AI/LLM ignorance- Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs? I can imagine a quarantined database used for specific applications that remains curated, but this seems impossible on the open internet.
Once or twice, for me it's deflected rather than answer at all.
On the other hand, they've also surfaced information (later independently confirmed by myself) that I had not been able to find for years. I don't know what to make of it.
That's definitely been my experience. I work with a lot of weird code bases that have never been public facing and AI has horrible responses for that stuff.
As soon as I tried to make a todomvc it started working great but I wonder how much value that really brings to the table.
It's great for me though. I can finally make a todomvc tailored to my specific needs.
It'll be a single sheet of paper with a QR code that redirects to a canned prompt hosted at whichever LLM server paid the most to the manufacturer for their content.
I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.
Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.
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?
AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.
Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.
There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.
Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.
Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.
The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.
Quality content stopped being profitable well before ChatGPT. Quantity beat quality as a content strategy flooding the search page with high-level obvious “how-tos” and “best vacuum cleaner” slop. This destroyed the consumer search experience. Current models have plenty of rich historical data and are good at synthesizing quality responses with the right queries. Now the risk is that AI will be starved of recent quality information to pull from. Hopefully the pendulum swings back around to make quality information profitable again…
Bots creating content, bots clicking on content, bots reading that content, and bots creating more content from it. It'll be like a capitalist cousin to Newspeak[1]; instead of a top-down enforcement of the language it will evolve by popular demand.
Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.
honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.
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.
What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.
You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.
It doesn't help that tech publications and gaming websites keep getting bought out by crypto and gambling companies.
https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.
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.
If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?
Yea so I’ve had an issue getting video output after boot on a new AMD R9700 Pro. None of the, albeit free, models from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic have really been helpful. I found the pro drivers myself. They never mentioned them.
Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.
Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:
> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.
This then becomes the hardware manufacturers problem. If their new hardware fails for to many users it will no longer be purchased. If they externalize their problem solving like so many companies, they won't be able to gain market share.
This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.
Right, that success story is only because there was "organic" (for lack of a better term) information from an original source. What happens when all information is nth generation AI feedback with all links to the original source lost?
Edit: A question from AI/LLM ignorance- Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs? I can imagine a quarantined database used for specific applications that remains curated, but this seems impossible on the open internet.
> Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs?
I think, for public internet data, we can only be reasonably confident for information before the big release of ChatGPT.
That's exactly why text written before the first LLMs has a premium on it these days. So no, all major models suffer from slop in their training data.
We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.
In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
Once or twice, for me it's deflected rather than answer at all.
On the other hand, they've also surfaced information (later independently confirmed by myself) that I had not been able to find for years. I don't know what to make of it.
That's definitely been my experience. I work with a lot of weird code bases that have never been public facing and AI has horrible responses for that stuff.
As soon as I tried to make a todomvc it started working great but I wonder how much value that really brings to the table.
It's great for me though. I can finally make a todomvc tailored to my specific needs.
Presumably companies will still provide manuals.
It'll be a single sheet of paper with a QR code that redirects to a canned prompt hosted at whichever LLM server paid the most to the manufacturer for their content.
If that was adequate then there wouldn't there not be supplementary material?
Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful synthesizer manuals.
There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.
I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.
I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.
Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.
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?
> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it
I thought we wanted the truth.
Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22 years.
AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.
good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"
Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.
There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.
You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
> People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this.
And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.
Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.
Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.
I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.
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?
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.
The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.
Quality content stopped being profitable well before ChatGPT. Quantity beat quality as a content strategy flooding the search page with high-level obvious “how-tos” and “best vacuum cleaner” slop. This destroyed the consumer search experience. Current models have plenty of rich historical data and are good at synthesizing quality responses with the right queries. Now the risk is that AI will be starved of recent quality information to pull from. Hopefully the pendulum swings back around to make quality information profitable again…
Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?
Bots creating content, bots clicking on content, bots reading that content, and bots creating more content from it. It'll be like a capitalist cousin to Newspeak[1]; instead of a top-down enforcement of the language it will evolve by popular demand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.
the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info
the rest are ad scams
honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.
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.
What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.
now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats
Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.