Below are the most recent 30 comments. I try to keep it clean of comment spam, but some times things
get through and it takes me several hours to get to it. So please excuse any of that comment spam.
Retire, and this is what us publishers are facing. Literal extinction. They really need to roll back or face a car crash. There is NO way, no amount of narrative (as they are currently recruiting people to do this) that will change the fact AI does not result in ROI. The forgot about the human trust needed.
hi sir barry, the 'onwards' in the third paragraph is spelled wrong. i hope sir barry you dont put my correction of your spellings in a bad light. you've noticed that I am always the one doing that, hahah. i am not also a native english speaker since i am from Philippines so you will notice my english is so bad. But I really your site and support your work.
By the way, here in Philippines, shuffling in seach results these past saturday and sunday is so crazy.
When I searched 'blogspot forum', the one came top in serp is facebook page that didn't appear in first page before ever. Google is so cooked.
I just had a chat with a friend who runs a site that use to reach 3 million people a month - and he said he thinks hes done.
He is thinking of switching off AdSense/ADX.
Blocking Googlebot from crawling.
And pulling out of the ecosystem entirely.
The UK search is in an absolute shambles today. The number of low-quality, spammy sites in search results is the highest I've seen in probably over a year...
ok so after tried starting "career on linkedin" as a social media manager for fitness coaches( which turns out to be a fucking debacle when I checked what people are posting, and each post have to have some fucking awkard photo of me pretending to care) I even completely updated profile, even created my own posts.. I officially decided to start youtube channel reviewing hardware synths. I already made this when I was younger have taste and skill for this. just purchased Drumbrute impact by Arturia, best thing? I can do this for 10-20 years (will eventually get there at some point), and I don't need to beg any fucking "clients" for anything - this is inbound marketing at its best, ps. i don't worry about AI, have my own taste, POV, just will take some time! hope you have same passion and can build someting great!
I bet if you were to objectively review the AI Overview, it'll be all perfect and great. Google makes the SERPs awful so people rely on the AI Overviews which then will give them an excuse to get rid of the 10 blue links.
The SERPs are awful, and full of hacked and repurposed crap. It's embarassing to be honest that Google has let it go for so long. I agree with you, there must be something mammoth of the horizon, but I'm not convinced those working hard will prosper from it.
I now have 3 sites that wait for my reviews, and then spin it through AI and pass the work off as their own. It's changed just enough to make a takedown difficult, and then all 3 sites rank above me. Two of them are major competitors, and have doubled in traffic size off the back of my work whilst I have lost 30-40%.
Any update that comes along I think they will all get hit, but all that happens is they grow bigger and I lose more traffic. There is so much AI it just feels to me like it won't ever get better.
The AI powered configuration tool is not worth the hype. It guesses regEx which half of the don't do what you want them to. You are not missing much Barry ... ;-)
This happens every single day, and yet still no change here. In excess of 95% down, wiped from News, Discover and Search. I keep publishing everyday as normal, trying to tweak the content where possible. Can't believe I now pray for a core update to even bring me back 5% of my traffic, because what can possibly happen, I lose a further 3%? Nice
Google just doesn't care. They'll even steal your voice and use it as their own.
<b>Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice</b> - <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/longtime-npr-host-david-greene-220751329.html">https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/longtime-npr-host-david-greene-220751329.html</a>
<blockquote>David Greene, the longtime host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” is suing Google, alleging that the male podcast voice in the company’s NotebookLM tool is based on Greene, according to The Washington Post.
Greene said that after friends, family members, and coworkers began emailing him about the resemblance, he became convinced that the voice was replicating his cadence, intonation, and use of filler words like “uh.”</blockquote>
Amazon is supposed to be working on a marketplace for media publishers to sell their content to AI companies. That would be another greedy middleman between the publisher and end users that erodes publisher earnings. Even if these marketplaces are created, it won't apply to most non-media publishers who will be shut out just like we're being shut out now with ever declining traffic. Why would any AI company want to pay smaller publishers when they've already taken all their content for free? I think smaller publishers have already been gutted by big tech and won't return. Some will continue producing content, but with little to no earnings for their time they will conclude at some point it's time to quit or use AI to publish massive amounts of slop until that too becomes ineffective.
But cable tv was the only infrastructure.. there were no other options. and when one come along like the internet. now look at them, a dying breed. just like mainstream media. there will be a stage where they have to pay or reward peopel for content or just spew gibberish out which is the stage we are at now., in 2022 you could see it starting but now it's almost unusable.
Google will not stop until they disembowel the entire web because there's nothing to stop them.
In my opinion, what will survive are big brands and Google. Almost like having cable TV with a thousand channels that are all owned by a handful of big companies. If you want to be found, then you will have to pay for commercials.
Those with a following (blogs, forums, etc) that's keeping them alive with some traffic now will suffer attrition and decline as being discovered gets more difficult/costly. At least for the next few years I see no other direction because we have geriatrics in Washington DC who know nothing about technology except that it's cool to attack their political enemies with AI slop they created. Even if a new administration comes into power that views Google as the criminal enterprise they are, and not humanity's savior the current delusional administration thinks it is, the damage done will have been permanent.
I'm experiencing this already my whole life as I have asperger, 99% of poeple are strangers to me, I'm too normal to be weird, but too weird to be normal, so nobody notices, and I'm like a shade