Thursday 16th May: The recession of the human-powered web

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I don’t know if it’s just because I’m tired but so many industry stories at the moment seem thoroughly depressing. This from Casey Newton is an essential - but cheerless - read about how the web is in a state of ‘managed decline’, and what that means for us poor souls trying to make a living from it.

“It remains to be seen how much [the decline] matters to the vast majority of people whose livelihoods do not depend directly on web traffic,” Newton writes, asking a question many of us would probably not care to answer. “I suspect billions of people will be happy to receive their answers to complicated queries directly on the search results page, uninterested in where the information comes from, so long as it’s accurate enough.”

“But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism funded, the arrival of AI search bodes ill for the future. Google will now do the Googling for you, and everyone who benefited from humans doing the Googling will very soon need to come up with a Plan B.”

See above for general pessimism. Fake studies have been flooding the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions. Wherever there’s a weakness in a system like this, you can be sure someone is ready to exploit it for profit.

I was sad not to be able to make the PPA Festival last month but have been looking forward to reading the write-ups, and here’s a good one from Charlotte Tobitt about how publishers should focus on quality over quantity to win TikTok. It’s curious though that Edward Lindeman equates engagement as synonymous with quality indicators. What other platforms do we know that have fallen foul of that in recent years…

Ah, the power of the brand. And a slightly more positive piece than the title would imply. What I like here is the second part, where Morrissey speculates that audio will do well in an AI era. He thinks that as AI slop floods feed media, people will turn to non-synthetic media like podcasts. So if you want to make a longer-term bet, might I suggest you come to our Publisher Podcast Summit on June 12th? I promise to be in a more optimistic mood.

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