I totally get that it killed your traffic. If a thousand people a day typing in "what time is best to visit the Sagrada Familiar" stopped clicking on the link to your page because Google just told them "4 PM on Thursdays" at the top of the page, you lost a bunch of traffic.
But why did you want the traffic? Was your revenue from ad impressions, or were you perhaps being paid by the city of Barcelona to provide useful information to tourists? If the former, I get that this hurt you. If the latter, was this a failure or a success?
Moreover, if it's the former, then good riddance. An ad-backed site is harming users a little on the margin for the marginal piece of information. Getting the same from a search engine is saving users from that harm.
Parent has the right question here: why did you want the traffic? Did you intend for anything good to happen to those people?. I'm going to guess not; there's hardly a scenario where people who complain about loss traffic and mean that traffic any good.
Now think of the 2nd order effects: they paid money to collect that useful information. If it’s no longer feasible to create such high quality content, it won’t magic itself into existence on its own. It’ll all be just crap and slop in a few years.
If the content was really trash it wouldn't have been dropped by Google in a jiffy after a surge of Press mocking Google. That didn't happen. Also Google Search is ad-backed anyways, so your position does not hold.
> If it’s no longer feasible to create such high quality content, it won’t magic itself into existence on its own. It’ll all be just crap and slop in a few years.
Except it kind of does. Almost all high-quality free content on the Internet has been made by hobbyists just for the sake of doing it, or as some kind of expense (marketing budget, government spending). The free content is not supposed to make money. An honest way of making money with content is putting up a paywall. Monetizing free content creates a conflict of interest, as optimizing value to publisher pulls it in opposite direction than optimizing for value to consumer. Can't save both masters, and all. That's why it's effectively a bullet-proof heuristic, that the more monetization you see on some free content, the more wrong and more shit it is.
Put another way, monetizing the audience is the hallmark of slop.
>Moreover, if it's the former, then good riddance. An ad-backed site is harming users a little on the margin for the marginal piece of information. Getting the same from a search engine is saving users from that harm.
Of course! It's certainly better to ruin the few sites that support their attempts at high quality content with ad revenue. Much better to let Google have that money, because of course the tech giant has nothing to do with enhsittifying everything through ad revenue of its own and pervasive tracking, or enabling ever worse content through SEO and AI gaming.
You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content?
I mean, what specific harm are you referring to? Particularly compared to the much more obvious harm of Google absorbing ever more of the web in favor of its tentacled surveillance/SEO gaming machine.
> You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content?
It's not necessarily evil, just statistically very likely so :). It's still affected by the conflict of interest, though. Making money off content directly means you either ask readers to pay up, or you extract that payment somehow, whether they want it or not. And since the site isn't asking...
> I mean, what specific harm are you referring to? Particularly compared to the much more obvious harm of Google absorbing ever more of the web in favor of its tentacled surveillance/SEO gaming machine.
At individual interaction level, think of it as smoking. One cigarette isn't going to kill you. Hell, some smoking might even lose your weight! But it still affects your behavior short-term in a self-reinforcing way, and long-term, it's gonna ruin your health. A site monetizing content with ads is like a store or library that lets you read for free, if you take a whiff or three of the specific brand of cigarettes they're sponsored by. A couple interactions may not hurt, but continuous exposure definitely will.
Just because the damage happens to your brain instead of your lungs and immune system, doesn't mean it's OK now. It's still an asshole move to expose your fellow humans to poison.
Comparing ads in content to smoking is some truly iffy, shaky "science". Conjecture more like it.
And finding a means of funding for content is not bad thing even if it involves a conflict of interest. You're painting it as if it were some sort of nefarious activity when in reality it consists of "here's our content, much of it is authentic, verifiably useful (people want it after all and keep reading) and also, we make money off these very visible ads right here. If anything, it's a better model than internally recommending things in content in a dishonest way.
What's more, compared to instead handing that content and those eyeballs over to Google, the top monster itself of online ads, dark patterns and gamed suggestions, it's the much better option.
Your underlying narrative seems to be that people trying to use their efforts at content online to make money is somehow inherently morally wrong, and that's absurd. It's particularly ridiculous when, as in this case, the alternative is a colossal advertising/tech corporation essentially stealing that content to suck away views from these much tinier sites.
> You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content?
Then you're an emotionally intolerant ideologue about the notion of profit in a digital content landscape, who isn't willing to entertain criteria such as good faith arguments, benefit of the doubt, degree or nuance.
You expect that people should be obligated to conduct their efforts at creating readable information for free, unless they want your moral disdain?
Particularly laughable notions from someone enjoying a site deeply embedded in the ad-funded Silicon Valley parasitic consumer surveillance landscape.
But why did you want the traffic? Was your revenue from ad impressions, or were you perhaps being paid by the city of Barcelona to provide useful information to tourists? If the former, I get that this hurt you. If the latter, was this a failure or a success?