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 they’ve 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 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
Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seems to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.
If a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.
I really don’t think any of that is to blame, it’s always been that way. The blame it’s squarely on LLM search. People really do believe the nonsense these bullshit machines pump out. I have people sending them to me all the time. And I see creators using screencaps as sources as well. People are fuckin dumb.
Content is so bad nowadays. Sites are overloaded with ads, paywalls, subscriptions.
And a lot of it is clearly AI generated
I think most of it. Internet is dead.
I don’t even mind subscribing to 404media, as I feel like their operation makes sense. But there’s no way I’m going to pay to read some sponsored content on a page riddled with trackers.
On one hand this is the death of independent sites funding themselves off organic traffic. On the other hand these sites were shit and should have died a long time ago.
They’ll still exist just moved off to social media instead.
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.
That’s because capitalism turned the tech industry into the shittiest industry on the planet forcing climate change into the final form.
