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  Aboutplants
  If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
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  eggbrain
  Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?
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  xrd
  I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.
• gortok
  Since the internet is ad-driven, what happens when these sites can no longer afford to stay in business because AI is siphoning off their traffic? What does AI do when the content it relies on stops coming?
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  NoLinkToMe
  Three things are probably true: 1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC. 2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone, and future knowledge (including that fed into LLMs) will degrade compared to a universe that kept this incentive alive 3. AI is hardware, energy and R&D intensive and VCs will need a business model to recuperate their investments and costs, a key-player has already announced an ad model re-creating part of the issue noted previously that we temporarily resolved How this is great in the long-run, I don't see.
• nerevarthelame
  The results seem plausible, but it's worth noting that the source of their data (Ahrefs) is just a rough estimate. Given that every publication they examined - including several outside of the tech industry - showed declines, I'd hope they would confirm that it's not an artifact of the estimation process. Ahrefs themselves caution against using their data to make these sorts of conclusions:>While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)
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  StLCylone
  AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.
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  daxfohl
  So, soon the sources will be out of business and the LLMs will have no information to look up.I guess the future model is, LLMs pay for raw data and news to ingest and use on demand, and ignore the "free" internet. That seems like a good landing point, where quality info is rewarded and cheap spin is not. Of course cheap spin will continue to be produced, but hopefully won't be baked into the system.
• djoldman
  > NerdWallet is publicly traded (NRDS) and its business depends on converting search visitors into financial product referrals. It went from 25M monthly organic visits to 6.8M, a 73% decline.The above refers to the time until Jan 2026. Here are its financials: Year Total Revenue Operating Expenses Net Income 2025 $836.6 ~$708.0 $48.7 2024 $687.6 $614.7 $30.4 2023 $599.4 $541.8 ($11.8) 2022 $538.9 $518.1 ($10.2) 2021 $379.6 $390.1 ($42.5) It doesn't look like the lower traffic, if true, has hit the bottom line yet.
• TonyStr
  Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.
• Anonyneko
  It doesn't help that tech publications and gaming websites keep getting bought out by crypto and gambling companies.https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
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  g8oz
  Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.
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  marginalia_nu
  I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?
• stego-tech
  That animated graph at the top is awful; does not render well on macOS Safari.That being said, I am morbidly curious about traffic from RSS subscribers: has that gone up, gone down, or remained roughly the same in the same time period?
• ilovechaz
  I barely visit here anymore.
• moi2388
  Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate articles have a negative effect?Who knew!
• zvqcMMV6Zcr
  I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.
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  Eddy_Viscosity2
  Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?
• dujuku
  Quality content stopped being profitable well before ChatGPT. Quantity beat quality as a content strategy flooding the search page with high-level obvious “how-tos” and “best vacuum cleaner” slop. This destroyed the consumer search experience. Current models have plenty of rich historical data and are good at synthesizing quality responses with the right queries. Now the risk is that AI will be starved of recent quality information to pull from. Hopefully the pendulum swings back around to make quality information profitable again…
• WarmWash
  Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.
• Apreche
  Potentially hot take.I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.
• Henchman21
  I think this is a good thing, and a natural evolution of the tech.The LLMs will aggregate knowledge until that knowledge becomes useless to us. Then the LLMs will become near to useless for us because they lack that new info. Then the traffic generally on the internet will wane and this multi-decade distraction will pass into history to be replace and/or augmented to create something new that serves our purposes at that time.The need for communication doesn't go away. The need for this particular iteration of networked telecommunications + dark-pattern-laden social media doesn't even exist in the first place, except to the social network owners. It too shall pass.
• FrustratedMonky
  What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?
• AznHisoka
  Good, now do Forbes.comThat parasite of a site still seems to rank high for many search queries, even tho their user experience is horrible (and their content too)
• ChrisArchitect
  It's not entirely the bad UX/ad-riddled layouts, it's the content. Other than Verge and Wired maybe, all of the listed publications are mostly putting out late, regurgitated stories. They're not on the ball, and so have dropped it. We're more likely to get a breaking tech story out of CNBC, Reuters or NYT and go from there. And that's not even getting into Verge and Wired's paywalls or syndication over to outrage-farm 404 media in the case of the latter. And where's Ars in all this? (which suffers from some of the same problems/quality/timing)
• fnord77
  the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful infothe rest are ad scams
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  catapart
  honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.cut the cookies and tracking, so you don't have to have a ridiculous compliance banner. cut the paywall that tells me what you had to say wasn't important enough for public consumption. cut the full screen ad breaks and page takeover nonsense.these outlets have had years (decades?) to figure out how to monetize content that didn't drive users away. they have failed over and over and over again, so why should I care that they are failing now? if it wasn't AI, it would be something else that came for them. if you rely on the captiveness of your audience, rather than the quality of your product, I'm always happy to see you destroyed. whatever comes next will be different, at the very least. and I'm an optimist - I'll always hope that it's a better way. if it's not, let that shit die, too.regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.
• Kirtirajsinh
  now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats
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  righthand
  Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
• fishcrackers
  [dead]
• newzino
  [dead]