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.

now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats

Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?

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.

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.

I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.

Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.

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.

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…

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?

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?

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.

the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info

the rest are ad scams

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

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-...

That animated graph at the top is awful; does not render well on macOS Safari.

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?