What Google Zero means for web publishers
This week's Vergecast did a great job summarizing the current state of affairs for web publishers grappling with the more-rapidly-than-they'd-hoped impending arrival of "Google Zero." Don't know what Google Zero is? Basically, it describes a seemingly-inevitable future where the number of times Google Search links out to domains not owned by Google asymptotically approaches zero. This is bad news for publishers, who depend on Google for a huge proportion of their traffic (and they depend on that traffic for making money off display ads).
The whole segment is a good primer on where things stand:
My recollection is that everyone could see the writing on the wall as early as the mid-2010s when Google introduced "Featured Snippets" and other iterations of instant answers that obviated the need for users to click links. Publishers had a decade to think up some other way to make money since then, but appear to have done approximately nothing to prepare for a world where their traffic doesn't come from Google.
To the SEO industry, such a world doesn't make sense—you can increase your PageRank one-hundredfold and one hundred times zero is still zero.
To younger workers in publishing, a world without Google is almost impossible to imagine, as it has come to dominate almost every stage of advertising and distribution.
To old-school publishers who can remember what paper feels like, they only recently reached the end of a 20-year journey to migrate from a paid subscription relationship with readers to a free ad-supported situationship with tech platforms that consider their precious content an undifferentiated commodity. Publishers would love to go back, but the world has changed—nobody wants to pay for articles written by people they don't know.
The only people who are thriving are those who developed a patronage followership based on affinity for their individual identities. They've got a Patreon or a Substack and some of the most well-known journalists are making a 5-20x multiple of whatever their salary at Vox or GameSpot was. But if your income depends on the web publishing dynamic as it (precariously) exists today and you didn't spend the last decade making a name for yourself, you are well and truly fucked. Alas.
None of this is new if you read the news about the news.
What is new is that Google is answering more and more queries with AI summaries (and soon, one-shot web apps generated on the fly). As a result, the transition to Google Zero appears to be happening much more quickly than people expected/feared. Despite reporting on this eventuality for a decade, web publishers appear to have been caught flat-footed and have tended to respond with some combination of interminable layoffs and hopeless doom-saying.
This quote from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises never gets old and applies well here:
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
Fortunately, the monetization strategy for justin.searls.co is immune to these pressures, as I'm happy to do all the shit I do for free for some reason.