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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#691

Post by afavour »

dingnuts wrote: post #654
afavour wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does. "Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great. If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

> point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

No, the point of paying for cable was to get more TV. Most cable stations have always had ads. You're probably thinking of HBO, which is a tiny subset of overall cable output.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#692

Post by niutech »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

There were solutions like Google Web Lite, AMP HTML or Facebook Instant Articles, but sadly they are mostly gone. There is still reader mode in some web browsers (e.g. Speedreader in Brave) which helps a lot. And of course uBlock Origin (Lite) is a must.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#693

Post by KittenInABox »

Aurornis wrote: post #567
DanielKehoe wrote: post #532

I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing…

> and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades. Simple content that can be conveyed in a few succinct lines of text (like how to uninstall Homeb…

I mean, then what happens when there isn't enough money in producing answers but technology continues to move forward? There isn't any more content for the AI to summarize to answer with...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#694

Post by lazide »

carlosjobim wrote: post #659
lazide wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole thread has a weird ‘ChatGPT is not at fault for passing off flat out bullshit as truth’ vibe. Wtf?

It is at fault for lying, but only a base person would go out in the real world and try to make other people responsible for the lies they were told by a robot. A base and egocentric person.

And ChatGPT pointed said person right at an innocent third party.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#695

Post by LocalH »

WaxProlix wrote: post #641
brokencode wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The k…

It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket…

It's funny how experiences can be so different (likely by Google's design, of course). I've been having degraded experience with YouTube using uBlock Origin on Vivaldi. I elected to make use of a one-month trial for Premium. Suddenly these problems went away. Interestingly, after canceling the trial, the problems still haven't come back (yet). Things like, I would load a video, it'd start playing, but the browser tab itself would just block for a good 20-30 seconds. The entire time, the video is playing (well, I could hear the audio but the visuals were frozen). Then things would unblock and comments would appear, etc.

The difference between my YouTube interface with and without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#696

Post by bombela »

tempestn wrote: post #664
kylebenzle wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube only still "works" because of the cat and mouse ad blocker game. I don't know how but my new ad blocker seems to fast forward through all the ads. For a little while YouTube had them licked and I was watching 10 to 20 second ads all the time so temporarily gave up on YouTube until the ad blockers caught up again. Now YouTube is still functionally broken on TVs and mobile phones but works fine on a desktop com…

Why not just pay for premium?

Not OP. I did pay, for 10y. But the video quality kept slowly degrading (lower bitrate). And ads in the video content kept increasing.

YouTube also increased advertising some paying shows, YouTube shorts, and more. No way to say no, only "yes forever" or "no thanks not right now". And it comes back in a few weeks.

It also constantly sneakily lowers the video quality.

So I stopped paying. I combine ad block and sponsor block and I forget another one to cleanup the UI.

Often I download the video so that I can actually seek around without buffering (because YouTube buffers as little as possible to save cost, which I can understand).

Content nowadays is 30min instead of 5min. So you better be ready to skip and seek.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#697

Post by chasd00 »

weinzierl wrote: post #309
littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

What you describe is subtly different from what is in the article. The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web. I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google. By extension it will be the end of SEO…

> I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to.

i can definitely see LLMs companies offering content creators a bump in training priority for a fee. It will be like ad-sales but you're paying for the LLM to consider your content at a higher priority than your competition.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#698

Post by toast0 »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #637
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect your reference pool is the small one. Most people buy their burgers in a packet and hence follow the timing instructions on that packet.

Perhaps this varies by region? I don't know anyone that buys burgers in a packet. They buy ground beef and either make patties or balls (for smash burgers).

I don't do much of the shopping, but we get costco frozen burger patties for most of our home burgers. I don't think it costs more than the same weight of 'whole' ground beef, and it's convenient.

Those are thin enough I wouldn't think to stick a thermometer in them... it would be too hard to get it in the center and not out the other side, and it's pretty easy to get a sense of doneness from the outside (or cut into one and see). Steaks, depending on who's eating and doneness preferences, thermometer is nice. Roasts, almost certainly.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#699

Post by pxc »

brokencode wrote: post #562
pembrook wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create. Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take…

YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The k…

I feel like YouTube's enshittification is already here. The algorithm has long been terrible, they now punish users for disabling watch history, and the ads are more frequent, longer, and more annoying. If not for inertia (lots of video creators still uploading primarily or solely there), I'd have abandoned YouTube entirely a long time ago.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#700

Post by fireflash38 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #351
SwtCyber wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's kind of a vicious cycle: users avoid bad sites, traffic drops, sites shove in more ads to survive, UX gets worse, and so on

> sites shove in more ads to survive This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course. I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the bi…

It's why brands slowly and steadily lose value. What's 50c more for a box of cereal? Why not make it 12oz instead of 16oz? Sure use lesser quality material, you can't really tell the difference.

The everyone just stops using it, cause it's shit and not worth the money.

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