https://archive.md/V2g6i
"On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to
make
404 Media. “Paid subscription started,” the email said, which is the
subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to
404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber
had been referred to
404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person
clicked a link to
404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and
only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber.
From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded
404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in,
this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the
Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and
barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping
website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In
that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent
more than ChatGPT.
This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website
up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always
working. But even for sites that don’t block ChatGPT, new research from the
internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling
1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a
website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Google’s own AI snippets
and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media
websites.
This general dynamic—plummeting traffic because of AI snippets, ChatGPT, AI
slop, Twitter no workie so good no more—has been called the “traffic
apocalypse” and has all but killed some smaller websites and has been blamed by
executives for hundreds of layoffs at larger ones.
Despite the fact that generative AI has been a destructive force against their
businesses, their industry, and the truth more broadly, media executives still
see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell
investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say
this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasn’t worked, and
pretending that they are forward thinking or have any clue what they are doing
will perhaps allow a specific type of media executive to squeeze out a few more
months of salary.
But pivoting to AI is not a business strategy. Telling journalists they must
use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business
move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a
machine that duplicates the work you’ve already created is not a smart or
sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy.
It is true that AI is changing the internet and is threatening journalists and
media outlets. But the only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense
whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to
show their audiences that they are human beings, and that the work they are
doing is worth supporting because it is human work that is vital to their
audiences. This is something
GQ’s editorial director Will Welch recently told
New York magazine: “The good news for any digital publisher is that the new
game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct
relationship with your core readers,” he said.
Becoming an “AI-first” media company has become a buzzword that execs can point
at to explain that their businesses can use AI to become more ‘efficient’ and
thus have a chance to become more profitable. Often, but not always, this
message comes from executives who are laying off large swaths of their human
staff."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: July 15, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-134166312
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
