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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

#51

Post by georgeecollins »

csallen wrote: post #18
dpacmittal wrote: post #5

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.

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…

I appreciate you defending an unpopular point of view. I have a hard time accepting that "pure" artists are unaffected. First of all, what the heck is a pure artist anyway? More importantly, all creative people respond to incentives and meet their audience where they are. A lot of the English invasion bands of the '60s went to art school. If painting had been the hip thing to do a lot fewer of them would have been musicians. There would have been a lot fewer cool websites in the '00s if there wasn't an audience and a living to made from them.

I have spent my life making video games and I can assure you market forces shape which video games are created for your enjoyment. There is a reason why a certain type of game appears on iOS and a different type of game appears on your PC. One is very shaped by the pricing rules of the Apple store and the other is very shaped by Steam. A "pure" artist may never be deterred from spending their days playing an accordion, but maybe the fact that no one is listening will cause them to choose a different path?

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

#52

Post by candiddevmike »

deadbabe wrote: post #27

The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections. This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.

No one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech.

There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.

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

#54

Post by _DeadFred_ »

csallen wrote: post #29
azemetre wrote: post #21

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…

Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI)

Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)

Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)

Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)

Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)

Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)

Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)

Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)

Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)

Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)

Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.

Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.

Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.

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

#55

Post by heisenbit »

ceejayoz wrote: post #14
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

AI kills search traffic. Yes. OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.

Until they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.

And until now had to pay part of their revenue to Google for search results being ranked accordingly. Diversity of ingress vectors may not be such a bad thing.

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

#56

Post by jeffbee »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #49
snowwrestler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites. It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic. Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most…

I know that I've stopped using Google's search primarily because it's been intentionally[1] made a worse tool. The AI overviews sound obnoxious and I'm not surprised if they're driving more people off of the platform. I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the…

The AI overviews are not obnoxious to me. I quite like them. It is the sites that are obnoxious!

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

#57

Post by slg »

brokencode wrote: post #31
xixixao wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?

I downvoted because it is naive childlike logic that excuses current bad behavior on the possibility of future good behavior.

OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies?

If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations.

EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

brokencode wrote: post #31
xixixao wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by AstroBen »

csallen wrote: post #18
dpacmittal wrote: post #5

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.

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 protect to encourage people to do it. This goes for IP law also in the exact same way - why invest the resources into R&D if the end product will just be ripped off before you've had a chance to recoup anything?

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

#60

Post by _DeadFred_ »

blibble wrote: post #11
dpacmittal wrote: post #5

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 like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again. isn't this the entire AI playbook? artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone total parasitism always kills the host

I think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.
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