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I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line. Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads. What is their income source now t

I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line. Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads. What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

pixl97 8mo ago
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
coldpie 8mo ago
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
  - jeffbee 8mo ago
    Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.
  - renegat0x0 8mo ago
    OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable. Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and stuff.
  - glenstein 8mo ago
    Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications, not gone from Google.
surajrmal 8mo ago
You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
NooneAtAll3 8mo ago
wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
zvqcMMV6Zcr 8mo ago
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads. This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal. The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.

I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line. Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads. What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

pixl97 8mo ago

Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.

coldpie 8mo ago

Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.

marginalia_nu 8mo ago
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
- jeffbee 8mo ago
  Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.
- renegat0x0 8mo ago
  OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable. Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and stuff.
- glenstein 8mo ago
  Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications, not gone from Google.

surajrmal 8mo ago

You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.

NooneAtAll3 8mo ago

wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?

zvqcMMV6Zcr 8mo ago

> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads. This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal. The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.