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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

bradt.ca

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Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#11

Post by djoldman »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #7
djoldman wrote: post #3

> ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems. > The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. I'm not…

Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?

Americans already, and increasingly, report getting a good chunk of their news from social media:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-med...

Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#12

Post by bradt »

djoldman wrote: post #3

> ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems. > The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. I'm not…

The large outlets seem to be making subscriptions work, though it does seem to be challenging for them. Ironically, the NYT is constantly running ads in The Daily podcast to subscribe to the NYT to support their journalism. It seems the smaller publishers really struggle to make subscriptions work.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#13

Post by kleiba »

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches.

However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)

Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!

"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).

My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#14

Post by kleiba »

api wrote: post #8

The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification. Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free.

Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from).

There's always quality stuff and crap, no matter whether it's been produced for free or not.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#16

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

tensor wrote: post #10
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?

People want realtime news. AI models don’t have up to the minute information. They need to search for that just like the rest of us, and would be subject to the same paywalls.

https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d...

There you go, realtime. As soon as the people you want it to parrot have posted about it.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#17

Post by jsnell »

djoldman wrote: post #3

> ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems. > The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. I'm not…

It's a business with odd scaling.

You can find examples of national papers of record having successful subscription models for text content. If you're only subscribing to one paper, it'll be one of those. And you can find 1-5 person outfits with strong personal brands (often built in other media) and a loyal following, who specially want a given person's take on things and want to read everything they write. Basically financials that resemble the "1000 true fans" model.

But between those extremes it is a lot harder to make subscriptions work.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#18

Post by dmortin »

kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers

The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads.

So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#19

Post by MangoToupe »

kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#20

Post by ben_w »

kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

On the one hand, I agree with what you've said.

On the other, I think it's unlikely the fun old geocities era comes back.

We'll probably get stuff that looks like it, but it's hawking nationalist revisionist propaganda instead of occult shapeshifting magic lifted from Sabine Baring-Gould, and a thousand Temple OS-inspired clones instead of python.

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