[karaterobot]

Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.

[ceejayoz]

> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users.

Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies.

Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...

"It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."

[csallen]

I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated.

The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.

The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.

[ceejayoz]

> I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated.

I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.

[azemetre]

It's hard to not see this as unintentional by big tech because now these same media outlets are completely subservient to their platforms. Very few media outlets can be the New York Times most are confined to Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Apple Music.

It most be nice to have a 40-50% blood extraction machine when these same media companies would have owned their advertising networks if this were 30 years ago.

I can't think of a single company that wouldn't want a 40% boost in revenue.