[dwedge]

While I sympathise and it's a well written article, writers engaging in SEO and clickbait (as they admitted) to drive traffic are just as responsible for the death of the internet. They're bemoaning the loss of traffic but that traffic may have already been stolen from a more appropriate search result that didn't have a team working on SEO.

Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:

> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.

> Advertisement > Article continues below this ad

They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.

Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.