Hacker News.

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%.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    183·
    13 hours ago

    Article points out its not just the tech sector either. I think three main changes (beyond ads being annoying) are predominantly driving this.

    1. 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.
    2. AI summaries from search engines that achieve much the same.
    3. 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.

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      10 hours ago

      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.