Comment by pflenker
11 hours ago
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
This reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.
But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.
The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.
But then, the sites its training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
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> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
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No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all.
Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
Yep, this is exactly why some companies simply don't work with Walmart.
it's because both google and walmart have too much market power
This is tough for the manufacturer, but great for the consumer.
I think it's a good tradeoff.
Real-world Prisoner's Dilemma.
It always comes back to game theory haha
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That doesn't feel like a repetition at all? You said that the first time there was "traffic loss but without the extra google money", but that this time there's no extra google money either way.
The part where data providers lose traffic because their own data is displayed directly on the google premises is what repeats.
"Nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it"
The fact is that internet is already "tech giants own realm": the power is way beyond public imagination and affects all of us in real life on daily bases, but there are still people thinking they are not the "evil one" here.