[echelon]

Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything.

Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well.

It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or revenue to any third parties at all.

We're watching Google's "embrace-extend-extinguish" arc for the web. It's not over by a long shot, but they absolutely intend to finish the job.

[vrganj]

Hi EU. How about one of those lovely anti-trust cases?

[skeptic_ai]

I really hope eu can extinguish Google before they extinguish all websites. Will be an exponential death of website very soon once they lose traffic.

[vrganj]

I'm worried about the Trump/Tech-Oligarch axis interfering with legal processes in the EU and preventing needed regulation.

We should've gotten out of US dependence decades ago.

[pkaye]

Its better off if ads go away. Just use ad blockers.

[zeitg3ist]

We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.

[rolph]

there are many laudable places such as yours, most auspiscious, deserving of reparations, alas such favourable anachronisms are unduly burdened .

i like to mail a fiver or two to a P.O.B.

[spiderfarmer]

It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.

[righthand]

Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.

[dylan604]

Depends on how in-house you want to go. If you go full in-house, you'll need sales staff to make deals with advertisers. You'll then need a way of hosting the media provided. You'll need a way to deal with media that does not match what you've requested. You'll need a system to allocate ad space accordingly to contracts with ad clients. It's like a whole new department in your company.

[spiderfarmer]

I don’t have a sales staff. I just call a company, tell them why I’m calling and what’s the opportunity, crack some jokes, get serious and make them an offer. It helps that I’m in a niche, thoroughly know the sector and that they most likely already know my websites. As long as I can get to the owner of the company, then I’m golden.

[egypturnash]

Spiders Georg runs his company from a cave and buys 10,000 spiders every day; he is an outlier and should not be counted.