News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic
News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic
I think it became inevitable that traditional 'sites' were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.
It's why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that'd be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you'd likely have a really great "AI assistant" to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their 'searches' with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.
Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users' ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.
It'd be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications -- don't need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they're all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.
People really trust it? Like it’s been so wrong on things for me, I automatically skip to search results past it. Why bother anymore
People on Twitter regularly go “@grok is this true” to everything and trust the AI to be correct.
The same AI that said the fresh photo of National Guard members sleeping on the floor was from 2021…
people still on twitter are complete, brain washed idiots... so this behaviour tracks
google search has been trash even before llms, i believe its one of the reasons chatgpt got so much traction. first 2 pages are just generic slop with paywalled or ad-infested content.
i switched to kagi 2 years ago and its has relevant results on page 1 that i won’t get in google even after 10s of pages. plus i don’t bombed with ads for that term for weeks.
I use extensions to block AI results... having to skip past them is annoying
I still find it weird that people don’t use Kagi for search. At least start page or ddg. Google hasn’t been useful for five ish years and admitted in court that they damaged results to prop up ads.
I used Kagi for a few months when other engines failed. It did come through a few times. But paying $5 a month to get one extra good search result per month was a hard sell for me. If they offered a much much smaller package of lime 20-50 searches per month or just pay as you go, I'd definitely be in.
Yup, I've been seeing more and more people straight use AI results to support their arguments.
I know several people in my community who confidently trust it for search. they are not stupid people.. but sometimes I question their choices
Depends on what it is. As a reference lookup for a simple programming function and with an example, it's been a game changer.
Which is such a shortsighted move because as soon as all the news portals close shop Google's scraper will have nothing relevant to summarize and is gonna be shit.
That’s when Google will buy what ever is left of Condé Nast or Buzzfeed at bottom dollar and start using more AI to shit out “news”.
they will be using that opportunity to make up the truth they want.
Watch his recent interview with Nilay Patel from The Verge. Watching him dance around questions about this was painful.
This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.
This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.
This Is literally his legal obligation, welcome to capitalism
No, making money is not a legal obligation. CEO at my last job told the board, two years in a row, that intended to lose money so we could invest in our people and tech. They cheered him.
there are many ways to fulfil this “obligation”… i’d argue that he’s increasing alphabet stock price in the short term but long term what the fuck is going to happen when the sources all go out of business?
… oh right they’re going to become a news monopoly… cool cool cool
regardless, i think there’s an argument to be made with all this “we are evil because it’s our legal duty to shareholders” that evil is a bad long-term choice. i think boeing is the prime example: if they weren’t “too big to fail” they’d be fucked because of their short term thinking
The sad part is this is actually his job description and Alphabet could get sued by shareholders if he didn‘t do exactly that. The stock market needs to be criminalized, not glorified as the one truth like it‘s treated right now.
You described all executives everywhere.
AI stands for Ambitious Indian
(Just plagiarizing the joke about that company that went bankrupt)
One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It's not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that's not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.
But if you're trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper's own decision making over the past few decades.
I'd say their decision making was mostly forced by their drop in ad revenue and subscriptions forced by the internet.
Though I do wish that someone would make a Spotify for news so that I could pay once and get access to all of them and at least give them 10 cents per article or something, because I will never pay the subscription cost any are asking.
As much as I'd like to support them, the price to utility ratio is way the fuck off at the prices they ask now.
That’s kinda what Apple News+ is but stuck in their walled garden.
It's also the speed of news now. When you had a edition a day in print there was time to do research.
Now with instant publishing on the web it's more important to get the basic story out fast. With the hope it's the one that sites like reddit pickup.
Wouldn't this kill their ad revenue? Which is like...most of their revenue?
Ad supported articles is a dead industry, Google realizes this better than anyone. People don't go to the source anymore to answer curiosities, why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?
“Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered.”
They followed up with: “You can totally trust me, and everything I just said. I am absolutely definitely not lying.”
With a link to NYPost lol
With what passes for news these days at most outlets I can't say I feel too bad for them that someone else beat them at their own game of feeding the masses surface level doom scrolling slop for engagement and ad impressions.
Hell, a large chunk of the junk being put out by these same outlets is trash written by the AI solutions they are paying for. Probably solutions from the likes of Google that is giving it to them at both ends.
Once the snake finishes eating its own tail maybe the good reporters will still have somewhere that pays them for the good work they do.
Where does one pay for quality news?
PBS is a good option too.
Yeah, they did it to themselves buying into the rage bait bullshit they've been doing for years.
Google wants it all this time. No traffic for anyone but them after they steal all your content.
They saw what AOL tried to do and decided they can make it work.
AOL? Like the company that was always giving away those free coasters and frisbees?
No! Pushing AI generated garbage is our job!
Glad this is happening. These are the same news outlets that provide Google with your information and pay Google for ads.
They can all bust for all I care.
Oh no... Not the major news outlets, how ever will we cope. Let them burn.
I'm about as anti-corporation a person as you'll find, but I don't think we should be cheering the death of the Free Press. I know it's edgy to say "it's already here", but that's just not accurate. When true journalists are gone, the only thing left will be propaganda.
Then how would I know the 10 surprising things I can do to be healthier? /s
I am sure ChatGPT can make something up for you each day
Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.
I shouldn't need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.
We need new search. Really we need a new web.
Blockchain's immutability might serve a public record of 'news', even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating 'social' media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don't have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.
Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can't talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying 'this video is from 2020'.
I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain's immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders' posts.
There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.
Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.
It might change the nature of the public debate.
they seem to be walking that back somewhat, moving it to its own tab.
Lol maybe they shouldn't have covered up the genocide in Gaza
