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The answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into writing accurate, helpful guides, it's
by nicbou 2y ago
The answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into writing accurate, helpful guides, it's devastating to have my work plundered like that.
Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves, they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested websites they replace. The only difference is that they will create no new information of their own, and they will destroy the indieweb that once provided it.
- zblevins 2y agoWhere are you publishing your guides? Would love to add another bookmark to my collection.
- nicbou 2y agoUnless you are thinking of moving to Germany, it might not be helpful to you. https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com
- zblevins 2y agoYou’re correct but this is pretty interesting and I’m sure helpful for people in Berlin!
- kylebenzle 2y agoDo you just like collecting links to online "guides" to anything? No preference for any subject matter, just a collection of random "guides"? Interesting, you could make a guide for that!
- zblevins 2y agoYou could say that. I have found that a lot of guides produced by folks on Hacker News to be generally interesting. Probably too much free time? Either way a guide of guides does seem like a good use of that free time.
- scarface_74 2y agoHow are you monetizing your website? Is it with ads?
- rkagerer 2y agoWho says they need to monetize it? Is that the only value we ascribe to traffic, now?
- JustExAWS 2y agoEither I’m monetizing my site and I care about traffic or why else would I care if people visit my site as long as information gets out there?
- wrs 2y agoIf I had a site (no time lately to maintain one) it would be because I wanted to inform people and contribute to the world’s accessible knowledge. I would want my information presented in context, accurately, the way I intended, not digested and reworded (often inaccurately) by Google.
- JustExAWS 2y agoAnd how likely is someone to find your site through search instead of word of mouth? I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.
- nicbou 2y agoI can answer that question with actual numbers: 90% of my traffic comes from search engines. The remaining 10% is much more time-consuming to acquire. It doesn’t help that external links are downranked by most social media sites.
- XCabbage 2y ago
- carlosjobim 2y agoWhat value does the traffic have for you? Is it lost revenue from ads? Or are you selling something? If you're selling something, then the AIs could very well be giving you more sales than they take away.
- nicbou 2y agoI guide immigrants who settle in Germany
- carlosjobim 2y agoHave you noticed a decline in sales from AIs? I'd think that for such a service, people who don't want to pay wouldn't pay you anyway even if they went to your website first for the information, and people who do want to pay will find your business through the AI.
- nicbou 2y agoI don’t sell my services. My income comes from affiliate links on some pages (e.g. for choosing a first bank). A vast majority of the content is not monetised. I noticed a drop in traffic, despite having added a lot of valuable guides this year. The traffic per page is way down, and only for Google. You are correct that people don’t pay for this, even when they email me and I personally assist them. There’s just an expectation that things on the internet are free and that’s fine.
- carlosjobim 2y agoPeople pay thousands of dollars for immigration assistance, even if you're just filling out paperwork. If you want to make money from your webpage, you could simply offer to help them with these things for a fee. And leave the information up if you want, for the people who don't want to pay. Also, the more information you have up, the more comfortable people will be to hire you. E-mails from people who want free advice simply gets the delete button. They can read your free information or hire you. As for affiliate links, I think they are a thing of the past. It's exactly these that web users want to avoid. Better to make a deal where you charge the bank a fee for each person you sign up. There's a lot of banks who offer these referral deals to all their customers. For example N26 gives you €70 per referral and Wise gives £25 per referral. You can probably make good money from your website from doing what you love. But ads and affiliate links and getting money from traffic is a thing of the past.
- timewizard 2y ago[dead]