We tracked the organic search traffic of CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and six others from early 2024 to today. Combined, they’ve lost 65 million monthly visits. Some lost over 90%.
I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but tech in general has all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update to every service or hardware is enshittification and SaaS.
New tech used to be really exciting. Engadget started as a gadget blog talking about the newest gadgets doing cool things. MP3 players, cameras, companies trying cool things. That category totally evaporated and reading about the newest smartphone or app with a subscription sucks
Content is so bad nowadays. Sites are overloaded with ads, paywalls, subscriptions.
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I think most of it. Internet is dead.
Internet has been on last breathe since few companies started controlling the internet discourse since 2010s.
Fediverse is, i think, adding a new life back. Forums are back, microblogging your mind without being censored by laws of a few countries is back. Static blogs are making a comeback. I don’t care how big, small or popular these instances are, they are lively as ever.
Here, you are no longer under whims of Facebook, Xitter, Google, Tumblr, or Reddit. If an instance bans you, just move your data to another. You may not be able to escape them entirely but there are more options than there’s ever been.
You can be a doomer all you want. For me, internet is rejuvenating without the control of few companies and countries. Yesz there’s slop everywhere, there are also gems if you find them.
The anti-AI sentiment here is proof Internet is not dead or we’d be getting told you’re crazy if you don’t just accept it because shareholders said so. That’s not the case yet.
Article points out its not just the tech sector either. I think three main changes (beyond ads being annoying) are predominantly driving this.
- AI scrapers steal their content rapidly, and put a rewording (or even just the exact same article) on SEO-bait websites with custom domain names, drowning out the original in search results.
- AI summaries from search engines that achieve much the same.
- Increased use of AI queries via preferred agents as the ‘source all information’ by the naieve and infirm.
The article writer makes similar suggestions.
This is not good, because journalism is useful and reduction in their ad funding will lower the collective quality even further.
People, especially younger people, need to get on board with the idea of supporting quality journalism financially. The decline in traffic is concerning in and of itself but print journalism as an industry has been circling the drain for years because advertisers and subscribers have increasingly abandoned the medium. Good quality reporting is an art. One that LLM’s are wholly incapable of.
