First the small fish :
CelebrityNetWorth.com was launched in 2008 by one Mr Brian Warner to provide estimates of celebrities’ net worths, based on publicly available data like real estate transactions, salaries, and news reports. It became a popular source for net worth queries. The company became very profitable. It relied heavily on Google search traffic for ad revenue.
The big fish :
Now in Feb 2016, Google began displaying Featured Snippets for celebrity net worths, pulling data from CelebrityNetWorth’s search-indexed pages. These snippets appeared above organic search results, often without proper attribution to CelebrityNetWorth, and sometimes linked to other sites (e.g., Bankrate.com) that cited CelebrityNetWorth as their source.
What happened? Traffic to and consequently profits of CelebrityNetWorth.com plummeted. The company criticised Google for using its data without permission. Google retaliated by banning its app from the Android Play Store, downgrading its search rankings, and excluding it from Google’s AdMob platform, thus severely affecting ad revenue. It was like being hit by a gorilla and the fledgling company never recovered. It continues to merely limp along.
From USD 14 billion to chump change :
That is Chegg, Inc. for you. Valued at USD 14 billion in Feb 2021. At USD 76 million today. A fall of 99.5 %.
What does it do? It provides textbook rentals, and tutoring and study tools. It provides access to a library of over 135 million questions and answers, offering step-by-step solutions to academic problems across various subjects.
Chegg says it is falling prey to the power of AI. Google’s default AI Overviews directly provides answers to questions as it has already ‘read and memorised’ the database of 135 million questions and answers in Chegg’s database. So students don’t need to pay Chegg and do not even need to visit its website.
Bigger fish :
That is AI and especially ChatGPT. Also Perplexity and Grok and Copilot AI and their ilk including the inbuilt AI in Whatsapp.
Google’s Gemini is not as good. Google blundered into AI by sneaking in woke ideology into it to make their results ‘more inclusive’. Thus getting pictures of a black Hitler and a black Cleopetra. They became a laughing stock of the tech world and have never recovered as a strong competitor to ChatGPT.
And so their search dominance is decreasing as knowledgeable users shift to AI tools.
To tell the truth, they are not being as paranoid as they should be. They are seeing the new bigger gorilla on the block in their rear view mirror, but are ignoring it by seeing that current search numbers are still good. They are in for a shock.
The coming world :
Now AI tools completely remove ads from the equation. So the coming world is very different. Very scary. Everything we know about how the net operated is going to be upended.
Without ads, how will the newsites work, how will search engines work, how will the world wide web work?
There will be fewer and fewer ‘redirections’. Just a wise old man who has read every word on the net, and who is available to answer your questions. All the people generating content will be doing so for his pleasure, for free.
You can ask him to educate you about a new book just published. And he will do so.
How will this model work? I repeat. Very different to anything till now. Very scary.
Amen.