Submitted 1 hour ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse
We tracked the organic search traffic of CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and six others from early 2024 to today. Combined, they’ve lost 65 million monthly visits. Some lost over 90%.
Content is so bad nowadays. Sites are overloaded with ads, paywalls, subscriptions.
And a lot of it is clearly AI generated
I don’t even mind subscribing to 404media, as I feel like their operation makes sense. But there’s no way I’m going to pay to read some sponsored content on a page riddled with trackers.
Article points out its not just the tech sector either. I think three main changes (beyond ads being annoying) are predominantly driving this.
The article writer makes similar suggestions.
This is not good, because journalism is useful and reduction in their ad funding will lower the collective quality even further.
On one hand this is the death of independent sites funding themselves off organic traffic. On the other hand these sites were shit and should have died a long time ago.
They’ll still exist just moved off to social media instead.
NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but they’ve all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update is enshittification and SaaS.
cabbage@piefed.social 57 minutes ago
Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seems to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.
If a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.