The web is dead, and we have killed it

The music industry had a golden age thanks to the Compact Disc. Then came a perfect storm of technological advancements – the web, the MP3 format, Winamp, and Napster.

Now, after thirty years of the banner ad, the ad-supported web is having its Napster moment.

When I first sat down to write this, I felt this was disastrous. Probably echoes of a past life, when banner ads put a roof over my head.

Then I remembered a time a bit further back. Being a nerdy kid completely awestruck by the early web. Making stuff to put on it, just because. When every site looked different. When you'd link to someone's weird site from your weird site and they'd send you an email to say hi.

Maybe a bit more of that isn't such a bad thing.

How things worked, until they didn't

Google crawled your site, sent you visitors, and likely served most of the ads on your site too. Not that you had any choice in the matter.

They told you how to be a good boy. Structured data, Accelerated Mobile Pages, Core Web Vitals...and you were a good boy, and hoped you would get a pat on the head.

But now they summarize you at the top of the search results – and link to themselves in those summaries.

But, and I grit my teeth as I write this, this isn’t all Google’s fault.

Google had to kill its business before someone else did.

When I search for information the old way, it feels like I need to put on a hazmat suit.

Have you tried finding trustworthy information about what the best [product] is recently?

Do you want to come back to this recipe site?

Brave Search has been kicking Google’s ass for years, and I find the AI summaries useful more often than not.

They actually link to sites too:

Back when I was still in publishing, it was obvious that things had become zero sum. We went from a few sites writing the same story to a few thousand sites writing the same story. The end game here was never going to be pretty.

I have no idea whether a new, viable way to reward people for publishing high quality information on the web will emerge – despite it being essential for every new training run.