Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “It’s Not Just You – The Internet is Dying”.
A recent study from researchers in Germany have found that search results are getting worse across all search engines. The study followed product reviews, and this is something that I have noticed a lot. The quality of the results that I get when I’m trying to find information on a product has been atrocious, but that’s just anecdotal right. It’S sample size of one. It’S not a controlled experiment in any way. Well, they controlled the experiment. They followed product reviews on various search engines, including Google, Bing and duckduck, go and found a consistent downward Trend in the number and the quality of relevant search results, and they say this is due primarily to massive amounts of SEO spam. What’S funny is that I thought that the issue was just advertising and to be clear. Advertising is a barrier that sits in the way of find the information that you’re actually trying to get.
But I didn’t consider that the SEO game is still very much alive and well and if anything, greatly empowered by AI, oh yeah. So attempts to address this problem by Google and others did have a measurable impact on the amount of spam and Google’s tactics outperformed its competitors, but that effect was both minor and temporary. According to Lily Ray a senior executive at digital marketing agency, MV digital, we are currently experiencing some of the worst results: he” s seen in his entire career in part because of an increased emphasis on user generated content and away from authoritative sources. Well, that’s because uh as as handyman and a couple other people have been saying in chat for a long time, the best way to get results was to append Reddit um.
But – and I don’t know why SEO optimization took so long to figure this out. To be honest, it was kind of weird, but they have since hijacked that as well or attempted to it still works pretty well, but this has created a major opening for scammers and spammers yeah um. Our discussion question is: is there a way to fix this yeah? I don’t think so, because the only way to fix the quality of information in the written web is for there to be any money in creating quality content for the written web yeah and there isn’t. No. The money is in just crapping out AI generated listicles of just you should buy doing all the same amount of work that you would have to do for something like a video, potentially even more and making it written. No there’s no written article.
That is more work than a video form of the same written article. Strong disagree. I don’t agree.
This will be an interesting conversation yeah. What I’m trying to get at is that sometimes written articles will go deeper. There was actually a long period of time where to go deeper on a subject.
You would go to the linked written article. Okay, so I should clarify, I did specifically say then, a video form of the same thing if it’s the exact same content, sure yeah. Okay, then we don’t disagree there, yeah yeah, yeah, very nice, very good, okay, um yeah yeah.
No, I I’m I’m just saying that some I I I find written articles will go further into things sure that yeah that’s fair, so the format differences do sometimes facilitate or do do sometimes enable a deeper dive, sure yeah uh, but you’re you’re never going to make The same amount of money um that you could with video because onpage ads just are worth like almost nothing and to make it worth your time you have to like do really anti-consumer very annoying web things like refreshing, the ads as you scroll and like inserting things Have things slide over the writing and all this crazy stuff, which is going to drive people ultimately away from your site or to ad blocking everything so you’re just going to make actually negative money because it costs you money for them to be on your site? And you made nothing off the ads, so it’s just like. Well, I don’t know some sites seem to be somewhat transitioning to a subscription model. I’Ve noticed a lot more pay walls and they wouldn’t be popping up if they weren’t working.
However, um, I think that there’s only really room for a very small number of sites to succeed with a subscription model. The donation model seems to be keeping Wikipedia afloat, but I think, given the percentage of overall web traffic, that is Wikipedia you can’t just look at you know, what’s working for Wikipedia and say: oh okay! Well, why doesn’t somebody else just do that? Uh – and I don’t know if this is right or not, but Wikipedia seems to be just kind of holding on, not thriving, I mean, are they? I don’t think they report their financials unless they do. I think they talk about like how much run rate they have left and stuff every once in a while when they ask for funding, don’t they uh, they do report their financials F year, financial statements audited by KPMG wikip media Foundation. Here we go boys uh. It’S a lot of pages. It’S like 20 Pages.
Let me see if I can just find the the bottom line. Part um. They have $ 75 million in cash and cash equivalents, so I think they’re doing okay, you don’t know how much it costs um for a website that, like basically everyone on the plan it uses, I mean it is just text, but it’s a lot Financial. It’S not just text they’re Financial assets at the end of 2023 are $ 5 million greater than 2022 okay, and that number is $ 196 million.
So I see they seem to be doing okay. Why are they ask for so much all the time then well come on Wikipedia they only made $ 5 million, but they do seem to have a fair bit of cash. Is that just profit or is that their revenue um? That’S I don’t know if you call them Revenue be no, this is liquidity and availability of financial assets, so I’m not looking at revenue or profit or anything like that they spent. Is this right $ 69 million on salaries and benefits? Like am I reading this wrong? Help me out guys is that is that what I’m looking at salaries and benefits that is $ 69 million right like I’m, not I’m not developers do be expensive. I mean yeah fair enough Awards and grants uh donation process, ing expenses $ 6 million yeah. That’S what that’s, what a bunch of $ 3 donations will do for you, yeah um traveling conferences. They spent 800 Grand on that. I don’t know how many people work there, though.
So it’s possible. These numbers aren’t as outlandish as they might sound. What travel in conferences? Well, I mean travel to conferences right put like 800 Grand. On that I mean I wonder how many like how many people yeah. I have no idea truthfully for a site that I use as much as I do and for for a tech you know hold on. They have 282 staff members and they’re spending 70 million a year on salaries sounds like.
I should get a job at Comedia, that’s a wrong number. In 2016, there was 280 employees in 2020 there was approximately 450 okay. So it’s going up a for a bit, and that was four years ago.
They hold conferences for their Community. Oh, oh, okay! Well, that’ll cost you yeah. We know a thing or two about that: yeah, that’s real, expensive! Yep! I’M surprised! It only cost that much! Oh man check out handy man is a good link.
He always has good links. What is this fundraising? Fundraising statistics? Oh, oh, look at that. Okay, so they’re trying to stay out ahead of what their their costs will be. Black is their net assets. Green is their revenue, red is their expenses, so they do, they do beat their expenses, but it do be close, sometimes pretty close, yeah yeah, you can see they had a really good year in 20201. There’S where that profit made its way into cash and cash equivalence. So they’re, basically like okay, we got this war chest and we we’re going to hold on to that. But these years they like they didn’t beat it by much. No, but this number you want them to hold on to the war chest. If you want Wikipedia to stay existing, I mean who knows when it’s coming yeah, you know when someone tries to go after them um I I I fully support Wikipedia sitting on. You know a couple hundred million in case. Isn’T it like Apple’s trying to sue epic for $ 97 million for legal fees or something is that right, like it’s uh Apple Su epic? I know epic Apple’s trying to uh $ 3 million trying to go hard after that, um that medical device company that um is going after them and has an injunction on like Apple Apple watch sales or whatever, like oh yeah, they’ve spent a fortune taking it to Apple on that and other other smaller companies have come out and been like.
Thank you. You know someone finally, having the resources and the stones to just go to totoe with apple and say: Hey, you actually cannot fing do this. This is not okay to just like set up an office down the street from someone you poach employees and not care about patents and IP, and I’m not allegedly, allegedly allegedly, and I’m not saying even that apple is alleged to have done.
That particular thing in this particular case, but it’s a common strategy that these giant tech companies do employ so that the people at that company don’t even have to move. You know they just go to the office of you, know: Google or Apple or Facebook, or whoever yeah yeah apple, had required the lower court. Don’T know what that means to order epic games to pay 90 % of Apple’s legal fees estimated at $ 73 million.
They spend $ 73 million in legal Fe. Actually, no, that may kind of makes sense yeah. It adds up really fast. It turns out yeah .