Farmfield

Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota is having the most honest conversations I've come across about the current & future of content creation "6 months ago, 75% of queries to Google get answered on Google. Which means if you're an original content creator, your content is getting summarized & sold (they still put ads there), but you don't get that traffic. And that's the good news. It used to be that for every 2 pages G scraped, you would expect 1 visitor. 6 months ago that deteriorated to 6 pages scraped to get 1 visitor. Today the traffic ratio is: for every 18 pages Google scrapes, you get 1 visitor. What changed? AI Overviews If the business model of the web has been search, fundamentally, for the last 35 years. You get value by subscriptions, ads, or fame. All 3 of those things are going away, and they are going away fast. And that's STILL the good news. What's the ration for OpenAI? 6 months ago it was 250:1. Today it's 1,500:1. What's changed? People trust the AI more, so they're not reading original content. People aren't following the footnotes. So if you believe the business model of original content creation is driving people to that content... I just have a really bad story for you. The future of the web is going to be people reading the summaries of content, not the original. What I'm worried about is - if you can't sell subscriptions or monetize ads or get the ego boost from people reading your stuff, why anyone is going to create content?"