The answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into writing accurate, helpful guides, it's devastating to have my work plundered like that.
Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves, they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested websites they replace. The only difference is that they will create no new information of their own, and they will destroy the indieweb that once provided it.
What value does the traffic have for you? Is it lost revenue from ads? Or are you selling something? If you're selling something, then the AIs could very well be giving you more sales than they take away.
Have you noticed a decline in sales from AIs? I'd think that for such a service, people who don't want to pay wouldn't pay you anyway even if they went to your website first for the information, and people who do want to pay will find your business through the AI.
I don’t sell my services. My income comes from affiliate links on some pages (e.g. for choosing a first bank). A vast majority of the content is not monetised.
I noticed a drop in traffic, despite having added a lot of valuable guides this year. The traffic per page is way down, and only for Google.
You are correct that people don’t pay for this, even when they email me and I personally assist them. There’s just an expectation that things on the internet are free and that’s fine.
People pay thousands of dollars for immigration assistance, even if you're just filling out paperwork. If you want to make money from your webpage, you could simply offer to help them with these things for a fee. And leave the information up if you want, for the people who don't want to pay. Also, the more information you have up, the more comfortable people will be to hire you. E-mails from people who want free advice simply gets the delete button. They can read your free information or hire you.
As for affiliate links, I think they are a thing of the past. It's exactly these that web users want to avoid. Better to make a deal where you charge the bank a fee for each person you sign up. There's a lot of banks who offer these referral deals to all their customers. For example N26 gives you €70 per referral and Wise gives £25 per referral.
You can probably make good money from your website from doing what you love. But ads and affiliate links and getting money from traffic is a thing of the past.
Affiliate income is tied to the size of my audience. Income from relocation assistance is tied to the number of hours in a day. So far I have made more money doing less work, and it helped far more people.
I’d much rather help a greater number of people for free than the well-off minority that can afford my time. I’d sooner run my business into the ground than change this.
Since you're an expert in the field, the time you spend on an individual client is much less than what the person would spend figuring it out for themselves. And time is money. Whether a person is rich or poor.
I think you are thinking and operating in the old paradigm, thinking that somebody spending a few hundred dollars on getting expert help on the Internet is outrageous, even if it's a life changing spend. Would you consider somebody spending a few hundred dollars on expert advice in a fancy office to be outrageous? Then consider that your expertise is way higher. There's nothing wrong with you charging for your immigration services and expertise. And as I said, you can still offer as much information for free as you please. It's only better for sales.
Google does not owe you any traffic and they don't owe you any business income from affiliate links or ads. Zero. If you don't like Google using the information on your website that you are giving away for free, then it only takes a few minutes to remove your domain from Google.
You can combine giving information for free with getting paid for your work. But you can't demand that Google pays for that.
This whole website's raison d'être was to provide neutral and accurate information about German immigration.
> as long as information gets out there
A possibly incorrect summary of the information gets out there. Given how much nuance I weave into my content, and how much effort I put into getting the phrasing just right, it frustrates me to no end. There's a very high likelihood that AI could give someone an invalid answer _and_ put my name under it, surrounded by their ads.
And ChatGPT 4o (at least the paid version) and the AI overview in Google both give real time links to sources. Well at least you can ask the paid version of ChatGPT to give you sources and it will do a web search
I use Perplexity and it routinely confabulates while linking to the source it confabulates from. Parent has a valid gripe that AI is essentially damaging their reputation by pretending to cite its information with a credible source, I wish there were some legal avenue to sue but it's not quite libel is it?
Building a professional reputation? Letting people contact you with feedback and improvement suggestions? Pure personal pride? Plenty of reasons to want your work to be attributed to you regardless of whether you're directly monetising people reading it.
And who is going to find or even care about these websites except for people going to them specifically because of a link to your profile on social media sites, through public talks or otherwise through word of mouth?
I don't understand what you're getting at. This thread concerns how we used to be able to find good information with these contraptions called search engines, so that word of mouth was not the only way information was found.
What I’m getting at is simple, no one is going to find a random persons obscure blog where they are trying to build a “brand” or be a “thought leader” that is not on the first page of search results.
I subscribe to Ben Thompson’s writing and make it habit to go to a few other websites because they have earned my trust.
The only method that most people have ever had of gaining traction is via word of mouth and not
through search engines.
No one owes you traffic or discoverability any more than they owed HuffPost or the other click bait, SEO optimized websites before the algorithm changes
I don't know how old you are, or whether you ever really knew the web in the prior era that we're talking about. Forgive me if I'm making flawed guesses about where you're coming from.
Back in the day, if I wanted the answer to some specific question about, say, restaurants in Chicago, I'd search for it on Google. Even if I didn't know enough about the topic to recognize the highest quality sites, it was okay, because the sorts of people who spent time writing websites about the Chicago restaurant scene did know enough, and they mostly linked to the high-quality sites, and that was the basis of how Google formed its rankings. Word of mouth only had to spread among deeply-invested experts (which happens quite naturally), and that was enough to allow search engines to send the broader public to the best resources. So yeah, once upon a time, search engines were pretty darn good at pointing people to high quality sites, and a lot of those quality sites became well-known in exactly that way.
I’m old enough that my first paid project was making modifications to a home grown Gopher server built using XCMDs for HyperCard.
My first post was on Usenet in 1994 using the “nn” newsreader
The web has gotten much larger than when it didn’t exist when I started.
But web rings on GeoCities weren’t exactly places to do “high quality research”. You still had to go to trusted sites you knew about or start at Wikipedia and go to citations.
Before two years ago I would go to Yelp. Now I use the paid version of ChatGPT that searches the internet and returns sources with links
I've had numerous people contact me directly with follow up questions about various info I've put on my website. Many of those have turned into further conversations and collaborations.
You can't have that if Google is plagiarizing your site and delivering the info.
All of them, because I'm not on any social media. I also mostly put obscure things on my website that aren't easily found elsewhere online, so very specific searches tend to end up on my site.
Also probably why I get email from people visiting as it's one of the few places people can reference said info.
Eh? My site is recognized and found on google searches. People find the info they are looking for and sometimes email me asking follow up questions. The site is working as intended so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
That's the real question, because younger generations use less and less Open Web.
That was actually one of the main concerns of Larry Page back in the day, that the majority of Web's information might get and be locked behind walled gardens, paywalls or whatever else.
Through organic search, you probably won’t find any of his free articles when searching for a topic on the first page. He had to put in the work over years and couldn’t depend on Google.
Walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others are the missed opportunities for the Open Web. Google nor any other search engine can't crawl their information, so Web users who are not on the aforementioned sites are missing a lot of useful information and social dynamics that would otherwise take place on the Open Web.
At least for Facebook, if the information is not publicly available via Google it’s because the content creator has decided not to make their content public.
Google very much can crawl information on Facebook and Instagram that people have made “public”
As far as “social dynamics”, do you remember Cambridge Analytics? Why would I want my social graph to be publicly available.
It’s bad enough that people have their contacts synced with Facebook.
If most information on Facebook is private, it’s because everything else gets spammed to hell. Same with discord. They are not a replacement to public, curated information put out by relatively knowledgeable people.
If I had a site (no time lately to maintain one) it would be because I wanted to inform people and contribute to the world’s accessible knowledge. I would want my information presented in context, accurately, the way I intended, not digested and reworded (often inaccurately) by Google.
And how likely is someone to find your site through search instead of word of mouth?
I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.
I can answer that question with actual numbers: 90% of my traffic comes from search engines. The remaining 10% is much more time-consuming to acquire. It doesn’t help that external links are downranked by most social media sites.
It doesn't matter anymore. There won't be monetary reward, citation, personal brand building, or anything. Google just rips off the information, presents it as fact, and a visitor will never visit an author's original website again.
Websites are training data and will become an anachronism.
If I care about my “personal brand”, what are the chances that people are going to find me organically on the web?
If I want to get my name our there - which I don’t - I’m going to post to LinkedIn, give in person talks at conferences, try to get on popular podcasts that have guests, etc.
Do you just like collecting links to online "guides" to anything? No preference for any subject matter, just a collection of random "guides"? Interesting, you could make a guide for that!
You could say that. I have found that a lot of guides produced by folks on Hacker News to be generally interesting. Probably too much free time? Either way a guide of guides does seem like a good use of that free time.
Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves, they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested websites they replace. The only difference is that they will create no new information of their own, and they will destroy the indieweb that once provided it.