800M Users, 15% Traffic Drop: AI's Great Content Heist

The internet just discovered it's been raising its own executioner. When Cloudflare's Matthew Prince fielded panicked calls from media titans last year, they weren't worried about hackers or hostile nations.

"It's AI," they whispered, watching their traffic evaporate like morning dew under a blowtorch.

The numbers read like a casualty report: Science sites hemorrhaging 10% of visitors. Reference sites bleeding 15%. Health sites in cardiac arrest at 31% down. Google's AI overviews transformed 69% of news searches into digital cul-de-sacs; no clicks, no revenue, no future.

Reddit sold its soul for $60 million yearly, then watched $20 billion in market value vanish when search traffic hiccupped. The New York Times plays both sides, suing OpenAI while bedding Amazon. News Corp's Robert Thomson coined it perfectly: "wooing and suing," the schizophrenic strategy of the doomed.

Desperation breeds innovation: Cloudflare's testing bot tolls. Tollbit processes 15 million micro-ransoms quarterly. ProRata's Bill Gross resurrects revenue-sharing from the 90s. Publishers brace for "Google zero."

• 800 million ChatGPT users feast on 15% traffic decline • 69% of news searches now terminate at Google • Web grew 45% while humans abandoned it

When your business model depends on human eyeballs but machines do all the reading, will you charge the bots or join the graveyard?

Read the full article on The Economist.

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