The death of online publishing
Traditional publishing online by small and medium-sized companies is all but dead.
How did we get here?
Ever since the U.S. federal government decided to remove the restrictions on internet commercial content in 1992 (fully realized by 1995), the internet has experienced exponential growth. In 1995 — long before social media and Google — anyone could publish directly to the internet, have it indexed in Yahoo or another search engine, and experience the joy of seeing dozens or even hundreds of people visit your five page website on personal computer reviews, helpful health information, or a hobby like fishing.
Online publishing during this time was amazing, in-depth, and creative. Websites looked nothing like one another, as people threw their creativity into colorful designs, idiosyncratic layouts, and tried out new technologies as they became available (such as Flash). You didn’t need to be a technical wizard to publish a website, sharing your hobbies or knowledge with others. Eventually one of the dozen or so search engines would crawl your site, index your content, and make it available to the world.
Search engines were not a monopoly at that time. They competed for users’ attention and use, some working better than others. Your choice of search engine became a part of your internet identity. Eventually Google took over online search, because it did it better by presenting search results with far less spam and irrelevant results than its competitors.
Social media changes the relationship between publisher and reader
That publishing boom lasted for over a decade, until social media took over in the early 2010s. Instead of publishing on a website, people were happy to share their every meandering thought, outfit of the day, and outrage to the masses in walled-in gardens maintained by companies who put profit over privacy.
As an online publisher, you could still do well in the 2010s. But it increasingly became a game of trying to get people to click on your article that you posted to social media (“clickbait”). Companies rose and fell on decisions that just two or three companies — think Facebook or Twitter— made about what kinds of content they’ll elevate, and which ones they’ll bury. Some companies spent millions of dollars based on social media companies’ directives or strategic goals, all in pursuit of traffic to their website.
Google made things harder for small publishers & individuals
When online publishers weren’t battling with their social media strategy, they were battling Google, the company that now monopolized online search. It became more about search engine optimization (SEO) than simply writing a good article and knowing a search engine would come along and index it. Google started demanding websites meet greater and greater often-arbitrary technical standards that had little to do with publishing great content.
It got to a point where even Google admitted it couldn’t tell you why a website that had been doing well for years suddenly dropped in its rankings, decimating traffic to that website. Without traffic — users coming to visit the website and view the ads run by the website — online publishers’ primary source of revenue dries up.
AI eats its own tail
The final nail in the coffin wasn’t social media, nor Google’s increasingly complex demands. No, the death of online publishing was sealed by artificial intelligence (AI) and how some companies are choosing to use it.
Google is using AI to keep users on its own website and away from online publishers. Most publishers have seen significant declines in organic traffic from Google — traffic that comes from its search results, not from an ad. By instead presenting an AI summary of multiple publisher’s content directly on Google’s results page, people have an answer that is oftentimes “good enough” to just skip any further clicking.
That’s Google’s goal, of course. The more traffic they keep to themselves, the more money they receive from ads.
AI is working in other ways to destroy online publishing, because it’s changing the very way that people get their information. The traditional way that people have searched the internet is to go to their browser’s search bar (or Google.com), and enter their query. Google displays a page of results, you click on a link, go to the website, and find the information you were searching for. If you were doing a deep dive on a topic, you might visit four or five such websites to get a clearer picture and increase your understanding of the topic.
Nowadays, more people are typing their query not into Google at all, but instead an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. Many aren’t even typing anymore, since chatbots can interact with you just like a human using your voice. These chatbots will give you a human-like response, using a complex language model that is based on a vast repository of content that they vacuumed in from the internet.
Much of that content comes from online publishers. Publishers rely on actual people visiting their site to digest their content directly. But with AI in the mix, actual people aren’t doing that as much any more.
Which leaves these online publishers in a pickle. Declining internet traffic visiting publishers’ websites lowers revenues. Lower revenues means less resources to produce new and original written content. Many publishers simply won’t be able to continue their work and will close down.
The largest publishers will likely continue on, but in reduced ways with reduced staffing, more generic articles (some written with AI’s help, of course), and generally a lower overall quality and diversity of content.
As AI evolves, it continuously needs new content to refine its language models. With fewer and fewer publishers publishing fewer and fewer well-written, in-depth articles, AI companies have turned to social media companies and online forums like Reddit for that content. While informal content of people talking to one another online socially about hobbies, movies, health problems, car, sports, politics, etc. can certainly be entertaining, it is not informative in the same way that an article written by an expert is.
The online publishing ecosystem won’t survive
Short-sighted companies who control the reins of AI don’t seem to care that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. In order to ratchet up short-term gains in usage of their various AI models, they are actively destroying the very internet ecosystem of publishing they rely on. A decade from now, this will all become patently obvious. Today, however, nobody seems to be noticing the harm as many publishers continue to limp along in maintenance mode.
Sure there have been some small attempts by publishers to claim some AI revenues for themselves by suing AI companies. But these gains don’t trickle down to the vast majority of publishers who are medium- and small-sized companies (often with less than 20 or 30 employees). Undisclosed, out-of-court settlements are common, and most publishers are left holding a bag of empty AI promises.
The future of online publishing is bleak. In my part of the world of online health and mental health information, I’ve heard from nearly a dozen high-level and low-level staffers at different companies talking about how AI is negatively impacting their companies. It’s not good and nobody seems to have a solution on how to fix this growing problem.
Online publishing has had a good 30-year run. Tens of thousands of people at thousands of companies as well as countless individuals have put out amazing written content during that time. But the monetary incentives for doing so are drying up. While individuals will continue to post (mostly to social media and in forms other than the written word), I don’t see a world where it makes sense for smaller and even many medium-sized online publishers to continue.
