caseynewton ,
@caseynewton@mastodon.social avatar

This year at Platformer we want to tell more stories about the web as it enters a state of managed decline. Here's @zoeschiffer interviewing a man whose independent games site was crushed by a change to Google's search rankings and its embrace of AI: https://www.platformer.news/google-retro-dodo-core-algorithm-change-ai-publishers/

Here's Retro Dodo's founder:

But the recent announcements at Google I/O, with executives saying that Google will do the Googling for you, producing AI messages that have been ripped from independent sites, it’s just the cherry on top. For independent publishers, there's just no more incentive. The way we earn money is that if a visitor comes to our website, we can show them around our site, there'll be a few display ads, maybe you can check out my book that took two years to create, or maybe you can check out our podcast and we maybe we’ll work with a sponsor so that we can show you products that we like. That's how we monetize. But the fact that Google now classifies our site as unhelpful, but are more than willing to crawl our website for information that is deemed helpful for their AI results, that is just the cherry on top. Google doesn't make money from visitors coming to our website, they make money from their search results, their advertisers spending longer on their search pages. I think that's just the future of Google now, which is really quite painful for independent publishers that rely so heavily on Google.
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