"Imagine you're looking for a chicken soup recipe using Google search: You click on the first result, and instead of a recipe, you get the backstory of a grandmother's secret recipe. You scroll past ad placements, autoplay videos, 2,000 words of meandering narrative, and 62 instances of the word "chicken" before you finally arrive at the recipe. This was the internet of browsing, and things were getting dire."
"It relied on a quid pro quo: Publishers gave away content for free, packed it with ads and keywords, and in return captured traffic they could monetize. Users paid with their time, their attention, and their data: scrolling past distracting pop-ups and cluttered pages to find what they were looking for. The longer this system went on, the less well it worked."
"For brands, the golden era of cheap traffic arbitrage ended years ago. Paid ads that once delivered outsized returns in the mid-2010s had become more expensive and less reliable. Rising cost per clicks on Google, climbing cost-per-thousand impressions on Facebook, and privacy changes that made attribution harder all meant marketers were paying more to reach the same audiences. To compensate, publishers and brands doubled down on squeezing value out of every visitor."
The browsing economy relied on publishers giving away free content and monetizing captured traffic through ads and keyword-driven pages. Rising ad costs, privacy-driven attribution challenges, and diminishing returns pushed publishers and brands to extract more value from each visitor. User experience degraded as pages became filled with ads, pop-ups, keyword-stuffed copy, and manipulative design patterns that prolonged visits without delivering clear value. Large language models began changing how users seek information by providing direct answers, reducing the need to navigate ad-laden pages. Brands and publishers face pressure to adapt to reduced traffic and shifting attention patterns.
Read at Aol
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