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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

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Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#91
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the consumer winning I’d rather be losing. As far as I can tell, free market means let the monopolies control everything.

Literally the entire narrative right now among online business owners, big and small (influencers, creators, indie hackers, startup founders, etc.) is that this is a golden age for aspirational new entrants and entrepreneurs.

It's really not the reality. AI spam is diluting the voice of 'new entrants' and removing any traffic based revenue they may get.

All I can see AI doing is entrenching those large enough to integrate it into their offerings in a meaningful way, and sustain a significantly lower cost base.

I use copilot at $10/mo. Gpt4.1 costs $2/m in and $8/m out. I'd do that in a single day, easily. There is no way any product I try and make can compete with that while consuming any meaningful number of tokens.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilariously, half of the examples you cite are laws created/influenced/strengthened by incumbent businesses of the past with the explicit goal of reducing competition and making it difficult for new entrants to compete. Let's take copyright law for example. Set aside the fact that the entire basis of copyright law is EXPLICITLY to give businesses a "monopoly," which is the exact opposite of competition. Your issue wi…

Please follow HN etiquette and respond to my position not call it hilarious. Also sorry for the wall of text. You ignored my point on copyright and 'what about'd your own as if that makes copyright law somehow not currently exist. Without copyright you would have market failure. Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him? Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books?…

1. Capitalism

I think you are misunderstanding a fundamental part of capitalism and markets, which is leading you to incorrect conclusions.

You seem to be assuming that there are a limited number of business models out there, and that they need to be very specifically (and legally) identified and protected in order for the economy to thrive. Or how else could you come to the conclusion that the market would fail without copyright?

Not only is this not true, but it is exactly backwards. The precise opposite is true. There's an unlimited number of business models that are possible, and for the vast majority, government involvement and specific "protection" only serves to limit competition and thus innovation and to hurt the economy.

"Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him?" With this question, you neglect the obvious possibility that Bob simply will choose a business model that can't be easily undercut. The vast majority of business models do not rely on copyright law.

"Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books?" This particular quote requires multiple responses:

(1) First of all, who cares? These are arbitrary business models, and it should not be up to you or me or the government to legislate them into existence. There are a billion trillion quadrillion business models that could theoretically exist that do not exist today, and the world is just fine. For example, imagine a world where you could copyright recipes, and the first person to make a pizza could make Pizza Inc., and they'd sell all the world's pizzas or license them out, and it would be illegal for anyone else to copy. And then I came along and said, "Hey, let's get rid of recipe copyrights." You would be sitting there saying the exact same thing, "@csallen, who is going to make Lasagna LLC or Salad Inc.? Who is going to invest in a huge recipe conglomerate if any tiny restaurant could just undercut them?" And I would give you the exact same response: who cares? We do not need some particular subset of business models to exist for the world to be okay, it is a failure of imagination to assume that particular business models that thrive in the current timeline are necessary or even ideal relative to what could be.

(2) It's arrogant for any of us to think we know so much about market dynamics that we can confidently predict that BusinessModelX cannot survive without CopyrightLawY. The entirety of the world's information exists online for free, and yet textbook companies still make money. You can get free online courses from MIT, yet colleges still make money. These things are easy to explain with the benefit of hindsight. But I bet you before the existence of the web in 1992, few experts would have predicted this to be the case. It's incredibly difficult to predict how market dynamics will play out because of the limitless ingenuity and creativity of the human mind multiplied by tens of millions of profit-seeking individuals trying to seek out an edge in the market. Even barring my "who cares, other alternative business models will pop up" argument, the idea that you or I know enough to have a top-down decree about what will happen to the economy if a particular business model disappears is incredibly unrealistic. The economy is formed in a bottom-up way, from trillions of individual actions made daily by consumers and businesses.

"Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out." This is one of the few points you made that I absolutely agree with, and that I think is fundamentally ignored by many supporters of capitalism, especially the libertarian types. Capitalism is essentially created by laws, and made possible by laws. I 100% agree. However, this brings me to the second part of my response to you.

2. Laws

I think you possess a fundamental misunderstanding of laws here as well, or at the very least, a severe difference in our attitudes and how we view the law.

Per my view, laws are imperfect. They are self-evidently imperfect. I can find any number of laws on the books right now that you yourself would agree should probably be broken because they are so ridiculous and in need of update, revision, or repeal that it would be unconscionable to actually follow or enforce them. Once you admit that even one such law exists, and yet remains on the books (and trust me, that number is much greater than 1), then it follows when and whether it is best to follow the law is a matter of subjective judgment. It is not a black-and-white issue.

Even our courts and legal systems believe this, and are organized around this principle. Laws can and have been thrown out as unjust or unconstitutional by the judicial branch, despite the fact that they were clearly violated. Laws can and have been ignored and unenforced by the executive branch and the forces it controls, despite situations where the law is clearly being violated.

Now, I am not an anarchist. I believe in the rule of law, and I believe that it makes life better. But again, it is completely subjective which subset of the law actually does so. And I don't think it's possible for any human to live without their actions agreeing with this, even if they ideologically pronounce a black-and-white stance.

Personally, when it comes to capitalism at least, the laws that matter to me are the laws that increase competition and that protect consumers. The entire goal is to incentivize people/companies to profit by competing, innovating, improving products/services/delivery, and lowering prices. And to outlaw every other form of profit seeking that doesn't benefit consumers (monopoly, collusion, bribery, sabotage, false advertising, regulatory capture, etc), in order to disincentivize companies from taking that path. In addition, there are regulations that exist to protect consumers and keep them safe. I'm a huge fan of this kind of law.

However, there are lots of unjust and poor laws that get put on the books, as I have already mentioned. Regulatory capture is a tremendous problem in a capitalist society: using the law to reduce competition for one's own benefit, at the expense of consumers, the market, the economy, and the country. This is not some rare, exceptional thing. It's a persistent problem that must be fought against. And the primary means by which unjust laws are fought and challenged is by breaking them (peacefully), and then taking things to court.

This is not anarchy. This is how the system was intentionally designed, and how it's been upheld.

So no, I don't subscribe to any sort of oversimplified black-and-white thinking about whether or not it is okay to break the law. Every case must be assessed and adjudicated on its own.

Personally, I don't care that much when Uber and Lyft deliver a product that people want, and it flies in the face of laws that were essentially written by the taxi lobbies. While there are exceptions (as I said, these things must be looked at on a case-by-case basis), I largely see those as unjust and anti-competitive laws, created in order to serve other corporate interests with millions or billions of dollars in backing.

While I agree with you that I don't particularly love the idea of companies using billions in funding to flaunt the law for their own benefit, I find it hard to understand why you are simultaneously so happy with companies using billions of dollars to write the law in a self-serving way. When these two forces go head-to-head, I will almost 100% side with whatever promotes competition and aligns with what consumers are demanding to pay for.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#94

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well.

Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#95
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.

Competition in the free market is not colonialism. The capitalistic marketplace is meant to involve disruption. That's the entire point: new companies come along and out-compete and out-innovate older companies and business models. The consumer wins. This is not the same as invading countries and subjugating the inhabitants, who have a human right to a peaceful life. No business in a capitalistic marketplace has a "r…

Google can link to whomever they want but stealing content and then saying it is not theft because they mix it up with content from other sites they've stolen from is not fair competition. It's more like the logic of car thieves who say that they took apart the porsche they stole and it's parts are now used with the parts from all the other cars they stole - therefore did they really take the now unrecognizable porsche? The court still deems it theft. If Google left creators and site owners content alone and created their own content to use in A.I. overviews - ie: becoming publishers - it would be annoying and spark innovation as sites de-googled but this is not that.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#96
Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.

As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.

This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#97
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the voice of dissent. I don't think it's unfair. 1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's…

Our society should have a way of protecting people that invest a decade into mastering a field from being made obsolete overnight. They're not business owners banking money the whole time and now needing to pivot, they're regular people being screwed out of their livelihoods. I agree that stifling innovation and disruption isn't the way, but we need something That initial investment in time/energy is what we need to…

I agree with you that we should help people who fall on hard times, and I agree with you that stifling innovation isn't the right way to do so.

I'm glad we have high ceilings as a country, but I think we're a rich enough society that we can afford to have a much higher floor, too. Our problem is that we simply won't tax rich people or businesses. (I say this as a fairly well-off person myself, and as a business owner.)

I don't necessarily agree with your final point. People are incredibly motivated to take risks and try new things and to experiment with innovative business models. Just look at the web and the millions of creative things that people have put tons of time and effort into, often with no payment. It's not that money doesn't motivate people, it certainly does. I just think that people are creative about figuring out how to profit, and we don't need to create artificial monopolies and means of profit in order to motivate people to create. If there's a problem that exists in America, it's certainly not that there's a lack of ambitious innovators and creators.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The cheesy “disruption is always good” is cutthroat SV capitalist kool-aid. It CAN be good, but just assuming it is good because disruption is dogmatic at best. Especially in a country with near to zero safety net. The consumer always wins is a fairy tale.

Wish you would have broken out the reality that disruption plus zero safety net = some people made homeless, some people commiting suicide, lots of people going hungry. The reality that a large amount of people 'disrupted' later in life don't recover to where they were.

You can believe in disruption and innovation and a stronger social safety net at the same time. These aren't opposing ideas. In fact, they're complementary ideas, because countries with competitive and innovative markets have a higher GDP and thus more funds to support a stronger social safety net. The opposite is also true -- countries that are low in productivity and innovation have lower means to lift their own people out of poverty.

We have a goose that lays golden eggs. We should be using the gold to do good things instead of trying to kill the goose.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#99
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the entire narrative right now among online business owners, big and small (influencers, creators, indie hackers, startup founders, etc.) is that this is a golden age for aspirational new entrants and entrepreneurs.

It's really not the reality. AI spam is diluting the voice of 'new entrants' and removing any traffic based revenue they may get. All I can see AI doing is entrenching those large enough to integrate it into their offerings in a meaningful way, and sustain a significantly lower cost base. I use copilot at $10/mo. Gpt4.1 costs $2/m in and $8/m out. I'd do that in a single day, easily. There is no way any product I try…

I think the problem is your mindset. While you're coming up with reasons why you can't succeed, I know hundreds of people who are actually building things that are successful. I mean TypingMind.com is literally just a GPT wrapper built and maintained by a single guy, and it makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

If I told you I dropped a million dollars in the Pacific Ocean, would you look for it? No. What if I buried it somewhere in California, would you search for it then? Still no. What if I told you it was somewhere in your home, would you search? Yes, and you would probably tear your house apart.

If you want to succeed you have to try, and it only makes sense to try if you believe that things are possible. It all starts there.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#100

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

It's not only you. "Big Tech" does not create anything. Even when it clearly has the budget to do so. Instead, it copies and intermediates (plays the middleman).
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