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I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website (https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 ye

by nicbou 1y ago

I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website (https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. Having all information mediated by two companies isn't just digging into my revenue, it's killing the fun. The unfortunate side effect is that it made me focus more on business and less on serving my readers. I'm working on health insurance stuff when I would rather work on a citizenship guide. It's also sad to see all the nuance stripped from my carefully chosen words. It sucks, honestly. I am being replaced by AI, but I am still supposed to go experience the real world and translate it into LLM training material. In the end, there still is a thinking, feeling human being doing the essential work. He's just not getting paid anymore.

boplicity 1y ago
> My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. I also run an online website that provides valuable information. However, we have a very different philosophy. The mission is very not not to "put new information on the internet." Rather, it is to provide a valuable and much needed service for people in our niche. While we do greatly benefit from SEO, we also work very hard to cultivate our audience, both in terms of finding new people, and nurturing our relationship with the existing ones. "Information on the internet" has zero inherent value without an audience. If you're not working to build that audience (outside of third party platforms), then it's going to be very tough in the long run, and you'll run into situations exactly like this. FWIW, our SEO traffic has remained shockingly steady, though the search console has reported a dramatic increase in "impressions," likely due to featuring our website in AI generated summaries. We'll see if things change over the long-term, but for now, we're not changing any strategies based on this.
- nicbou 1y ago
  The problem is that there is no audience without a third-party platform nowadays. At least not at a scale. Google was the lesser evil, but I still fully expected to get killed by an algorithm update some day. I vowed to ride this website into the ground if I have to. I believe in its value, even if I need a side job to support it.
  - CobrastanJorji 1y ago
    There is no "nowadays." There never an era of big Internet audiences without third party platforms. The early web only had small audiences, and the reason it worked was that people were okay with that.
    - tough 1y ago
      You could have a small audience of a few million users, not try to compete with the giants, and still, be serving millions of users (daily) The internet was a beautiful place
DataDaemon 1y ago
This is a great information website, congrats, Google is happy: "thanks for feeding me", they will scrape all and display on their site in the nice table. Sorry about that.
asdhtjkujh 1y ago
I came across your website organically and it's been a great resource for me in the last few months, including times when the answers presented by Gemini have been definitively and legally incorrect. Thank you for organizing all of this information so clearly.
bwb 1y ago
Ya, I'm in a similar boat (https://shepherd.com https://shepherd.com). Despite sky-high engagement stats, we lost 70% of our traffic from Google. Luckily, we have a strong brand, a growing community, and get decent traffic directly (and from other search engines). We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it). I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.
- nicbou 1y ago
  I expect to lose a lot of information websites, especially when the outcome of a long research is a few bullet points (such as product/place recommendations). Once tech companies feel the need to monetise LLMs, all bets are off.
  - bwb 1y ago
    Ya, I'm already seeing a bunch disappear. I am curious what it looks like when you need a good product review in two or three years. Is YouTube the only trustworthy source by real people? For most products, the web is just going to be Astroturfed Reddit posts and Forbes AI-written junk that didn't even have the product to test. I'm hoping paid MCP data sets might get there, then I could make my data available there, and hopefully make a $1 to $4 per thousand requests to the data set. If that replaced the loss of Google traffic, that would be amazing. I'd love for 25% of my AI subscription to go toward that each month, i.e., I can pull "a list of all science fiction books the NYT recommended in the 1950s" and it gives NYT a few cents to go through their data...
ElFitz 1y ago
> He's just not getting paid anymore. Or the credit. Or even just the feedback. Even LLMs get at least some feedback.
- nicbou 1y ago
  This is a surprisingly taxing change. There's a difference between giving free eggs to your neighbours, and giving free eggs to the Holiday Inn across town.
  - ElFitz 1y ago
    Exactly.
RobRivera 1y ago
We need a new information backbone
- RajT88 1y ago
  That was the idea behind Internet2. Never used it, maybe someone can explain how it has evolved.
mike_hearn 1y ago
If you want readers more than impact you might want to consider something like a Substack. The paying audience would be smaller, but, it's not crawlable by AI (at least not today). Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site. More generally perhaps there's a market for a Steam-like walled garden but for "old web" style sites. Crawlers would be controlled via technical means, micropayments would be built in, and use of AI would be strictly controlled. For instance maybe the garden uses AI to build link directories like DMOZ used to be, but the information itself isn't trained on so you're guaranteed to have organic readers.
- qkeast 1y ago
  >Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site. I believe these are pretty different scenarios. There's an ongoing, massive shortage of apartments in Berlin, and bots here often aren't bypassing "work put into adverts and apartment hunting sites"—they're trying to get an application in at all before the listing is flooded with hundreds of applications and disabled. The content of the application has nothing to do with it. (Of course, this just leads to an arms race of apartment-application-bots, but this is the situation the city's found itself in. Same goes for registration appointments, residence permit applications, and so on.)
  - nicbou 1y ago
    If you have a zero sum game, any advice you give is creating an arms race. The only solution is to have fewer Berliners or more housing.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      Or eliminate rent control, allowing prices to float to the level people are actually willing to pay. You only see bot-driven stuff like that in cases where desirable goods are being deliberately under-priced.
AfterHIA 1y ago
Just a little bit of encouragement: this is a really, really nice site that reminds me of growing up on the 1990's internet. You can tell you, "actually give a shit" about what you're sharing and that alone I think gives it credence and relevance. Don't let a silly thing like economics keep you from this worthwhile human achievement pal.
ChiMan 1y ago
Major free-rider problem, this is—one, however, that property rights could protect against: You own your data. If the OpenAIs of the world want to ingest your data, they pay you for it.
pentagrama 1y ago
A good strategy can involve betting on alternative distribution channels beyond search engines. Here are some ideas: - Newsletters. You own your audience and your list is portable and interoperable. - PWAs with push notifications. Be careful not to overwhelm users with too many messages. Make opt-out options easy to find. - Door flyers with QR codes. A return to the basics that can still be effective. - Social media. Still useful, but its reach and engagement seem to be declining.
- nicbou 1y ago
  I am providing information for specific situations. People don’t casually read about replacing lost keys until they lose their keys. It’s not entertainment.
p3rls 1y ago
My niche has been dominated by indian slop for a decade now who cares about a few robots getting in on the action?
timonofathens 1y ago
[dead]
paulette449 1y ago
Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking of creating a non-revenue online guide to my new city, Lyon, France, but I've been concerned that I'd only be feeding the AI machine.
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  Excuse me for veering off topic but I saw this, was intrigued (I used to live in Lyon), browsed some of your previous comments here, saw the book Carmilla, which I'd never heard of, and am very happy. I will be reading J. S. Le Fanu, and am stunned to learn of him. Cheers!
Jommi 1y ago
its super helpful. supporting. you should also accept crypto!
nextaccountic 1y ago
What I can gather from your comment is that the problem is capitalism, not AI.

by nicbou 1y ago

boplicity 1y ago

> My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. I also run an online website that provides valuable information. However, we have a very different philosophy. The mission is very not not to "put new information on the internet." Rather, it is to provide a valuable and much needed service for people in our niche. While we do greatly benefit from SEO, we also work very hard to cultivate our audience, both in terms of finding new people, and nurturing our relationship with the existing ones. "Information on the internet" has zero inherent value without an audience. If you're not working to build that audience (outside of third party platforms), then it's going to be very tough in the long run, and you'll run into situations exactly like this. FWIW, our SEO traffic has remained shockingly steady, though the search console has reported a dramatic increase in "impressions," likely due to featuring our website in AI generated summaries. We'll see if things change over the long-term, but for now, we're not changing any strategies based on this.

nicbou 1y ago
The problem is that there is no audience without a third-party platform nowadays. At least not at a scale. Google was the lesser evil, but I still fully expected to get killed by an algorithm update some day. I vowed to ride this website into the ground if I have to. I believe in its value, even if I need a side job to support it.
- CobrastanJorji 1y ago
  There is no "nowadays." There never an era of big Internet audiences without third party platforms. The early web only had small audiences, and the reason it worked was that people were okay with that.
  - tough 1y ago
    You could have a small audience of a few million users, not try to compete with the giants, and still, be serving millions of users (daily) The internet was a beautiful place

DataDaemon 1y ago

This is a great information website, congrats, Google is happy: "thanks for feeding me", they will scrape all and display on their site in the nice table. Sorry about that.

asdhtjkujh 1y ago

I came across your website organically and it's been a great resource for me in the last few months, including times when the answers presented by Gemini have been definitively and legally incorrect. Thank you for organizing all of this information so clearly.

bwb 1y ago

Ya, I'm in a similar boat (https://shepherd.com https://shepherd.com). Despite sky-high engagement stats, we lost 70% of our traffic from Google. Luckily, we have a strong brand, a growing community, and get decent traffic directly (and from other search engines). We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it). I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.

nicbou 1y ago
I expect to lose a lot of information websites, especially when the outcome of a long research is a few bullet points (such as product/place recommendations). Once tech companies feel the need to monetise LLMs, all bets are off.
- bwb 1y ago
  Ya, I'm already seeing a bunch disappear. I am curious what it looks like when you need a good product review in two or three years. Is YouTube the only trustworthy source by real people? For most products, the web is just going to be Astroturfed Reddit posts and Forbes AI-written junk that didn't even have the product to test. I'm hoping paid MCP data sets might get there, then I could make my data available there, and hopefully make a $1 to $4 per thousand requests to the data set. If that replaced the loss of Google traffic, that would be amazing. I'd love for 25% of my AI subscription to go toward that each month, i.e., I can pull "a list of all science fiction books the NYT recommended in the 1950s" and it gives NYT a few cents to go through their data...

ElFitz 1y ago

> He's just not getting paid anymore. Or the credit. Or even just the feedback. Even LLMs get at least some feedback.

nicbou 1y ago
This is a surprisingly taxing change. There's a difference between giving free eggs to your neighbours, and giving free eggs to the Holiday Inn across town.
- ElFitz 1y ago
  Exactly.

RobRivera 1y ago

We need a new information backbone

RajT88 1y ago
That was the idea behind Internet2. Never used it, maybe someone can explain how it has evolved.

mike_hearn 1y ago

If you want readers more than impact you might want to consider something like a Substack. The paying audience would be smaller, but, it's not crawlable by AI (at least not today). Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site. More generally perhaps there's a market for a Steam-like walled garden but for "old web" style sites. Crawlers would be controlled via technical means, micropayments would be built in, and use of AI would be strictly controlled. For instance maybe the garden uses AI to build link directories like DMOZ used to be, but the information itself isn't trained on so you're guaranteed to have organic readers.

qkeast 1y ago
>Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site. I believe these are pretty different scenarios. There's an ongoing, massive shortage of apartments in Berlin, and bots here often aren't bypassing "work put into adverts and apartment hunting sites"—they're trying to get an application in at all before the listing is flooded with hundreds of applications and disabled. The content of the application has nothing to do with it. (Of course, this just leads to an arms race of apartment-application-bots, but this is the situation the city's found itself in. Same goes for registration appointments, residence permit applications, and so on.)
- nicbou 1y ago
  If you have a zero sum game, any advice you give is creating an arms race. The only solution is to have fewer Berliners or more housing.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Or eliminate rent control, allowing prices to float to the level people are actually willing to pay. You only see bot-driven stuff like that in cases where desirable goods are being deliberately under-priced.

AfterHIA 1y ago

Just a little bit of encouragement: this is a really, really nice site that reminds me of growing up on the 1990's internet. You can tell you, "actually give a shit" about what you're sharing and that alone I think gives it credence and relevance. Don't let a silly thing like economics keep you from this worthwhile human achievement pal.

ChiMan 1y ago

Major free-rider problem, this is—one, however, that property rights could protect against: You own your data. If the OpenAIs of the world want to ingest your data, they pay you for it.

pentagrama 1y ago

A good strategy can involve betting on alternative distribution channels beyond search engines. Here are some ideas: - Newsletters. You own your audience and your list is portable and interoperable. - PWAs with push notifications. Be careful not to overwhelm users with too many messages. Make opt-out options easy to find. - Door flyers with QR codes. A return to the basics that can still be effective. - Social media. Still useful, but its reach and engagement seem to be declining.

nicbou 1y ago
I am providing information for specific situations. People don’t casually read about replacing lost keys until they lose their keys. It’s not entertainment.

p3rls 1y ago

My niche has been dominated by indian slop for a decade now who cares about a few robots getting in on the action?

timonofathens 1y ago

[dead]

paulette449 1y ago

Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking of creating a non-revenue online guide to my new city, Lyon, France, but I've been concerned that I'd only be feeding the AI machine.

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
Excuse me for veering off topic but I saw this, was intrigued (I used to live in Lyon), browsed some of your previous comments here, saw the book Carmilla, which I'd never heard of, and am very happy. I will be reading J. S. Le Fanu, and am stunned to learn of him. Cheers!

Jommi 1y ago

its super helpful. supporting. you should also accept crypto!

nextaccountic 1y ago

What I can gather from your comment is that the problem is capitalism, not AI.