Search traffic to the FT down 25-30%, Daily Mail down 89%

theguardian.com

3 points·ilamont··4 comments

This is a problem I have heard over and over across different publishers.

Global news seems to be oversaturated. There are dozens of outlets repackaging snippets from reuters and elsewhere into articles. They come out around the same time, hit more or less the same beats, and for the reader are essentially fungible with other articles on the topic.

Before AI overviews they would use SEO to game their way into traffic. That allowed everyone to publish the same content with lots of friction and the biggest brands would still do well. It seems AI overviews has shown these companies users "revealed preference", and it isn't for their high friction websites.

My hunch is any attempt at a solution here is for news outlets to form their own consortium to offer the same type of licensing deal Reddit provides to consumer LLM providers to get access to their data. They either need to charge for the data, or offer a portal themselves to get to the content (think ChatGPT meets Google News). The eyeballs are leaving either way, this is existential.

I think that is more or less what cloudflare is trying to do with their market, and what tollbit is doing.

One nice thing about this new business model is that it doesn't rely on display ads (not that they can't do both). Conceivably ad rev could drop so low it isn't worth compromising their UX. So theoretically we could get far more readable news websites.

The new friction will be convincing the gate keepers you are a human.

Agentic text generation is the issue, what's the point of going to the website when that happens. Though if I may say that BestInternetSearch.com continues to refer links to the website as users and businesses want, though please advertise with us, including its GoodInternetSearch.com.

Good day.

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