“Journalists” are worried about Google’s new chatbot.
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The consequences for the internet as we know it will be profound. For news publishers, they have already been profound. Industry executives are quietly sounding the alarm about “Google Zero,” a term popularized by The Verge’s Nilay Patel to describe the moment when Google stops sending any referral traffic to third-party sites. In conversations with other publishers, I’m consistently hearing about the steep traffic declines they’re already experiencing, particularly over the past quarter.
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Google didn’t take away something you already had. Google simply stopped giving you a free gift that it was giving you for 10 years. Before Google, newspapers got traffic from TRAFFIC. They placed vending machines on busy sidewalks. They sold copies in grocery stores. They drove around town distributing free copies.
You allowed yourself to rely on Google’s free gifts, now you have to return to what you were doing for 200 years. Even if we compare with earlier versions of search engines, newspapers didn’t rely on the Yellow Pages for links, and they didn’t rely on TV stations or other newspapers for links. They sold their product.
Polistra's Mill 