How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)

25:58But I feel like what happened with Google and the internet is more than that. I feel like it's as if the map became the thing instead of the thing it was describing. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they built the greatest highway system that the internet had ever seen, and then over time, it has just shrunk to the size of a parking lot. And anybody who searches it is just driving around in a circle in the parking lot. And why did that happen? Because everyone has experienced that, but what made that happen? I mean, I think my answer to that would be that Google just wound up being arguably the biggest economic victor from the internet in terms of certainly the amount of digital advertising revenue that they were able to generate from the internet.

26:40And digital advertising revenue is like the single biggest category of revenue, I think. Is that true? Well, I don't know. We should look that up. We'll look that up. We did look this up. We're professional podcasters. Alphabet. Google's confusingly named parent company made$307 billion last year. Google search alone accounted for$175 billion. The New York Times, by comparison,$2.4 billion. The publishing industry, it was really amazing when it was just like newspapers, but nobody was making$100 billion a year, right? Like, Google was able to just sort of go out and over the years, more and more of that advertising revenue just accrued to Google.

27:20like Google just became like the most powerful thing. And publishers just became disempowered. They laid people off, they scrambled, you know, whatever they could do to like get up high on those search results, they would do, it would work for a time. Then the algorithm would change. Then, you know, more people would be laid off. Like all of this just had like a downward pressure on the quality of things. Like people couldn't afford to take big swings anymore. They couldn't afford to hire big staffs anymore. And so you just get more of these like generic websites telling you about that week's movie trailer.

27:51So like basically Google got too much of the money and like the rest of the digital media ecosystem, in my opinion, did not get enough. And there's a very solid narrative that has unfolded over the past few years that Google just isn't as good as it used to be at searching for things. In part that is just because there are so many more ads now on the sort of high value searches that people often do on Google. A predictable way that Google has added revenue over the past couple of years when they need to show growth to Wall Street is they'll literally just add one more sponsored link to mobile search results.

28:26So maybe it used to take five links before you would see what they call an organic result, so a result that has not been paid for. Now I think it's up to seven, right? Now maybe most people don't even realize that those are sponsored links and they're perfectly happy to click on ads all day. But for people who are a little bit savvier and who just kind of wanted to see a web that wasn't totally corrupted by commercial values, that just feels like it is harder to find. And it is in part because people are not making as much stuff for the web as they used to because there is not as much money in it.

28:56Right. It's funny. It's like Google's really two businesses that even within themselves are sort of in competition. There's like the search part of it where we're serving people who want to find stuff on the internet and the advertising part of it, which is like we want people who are trying to find stuff on the internet to get distracted on their way and stop at our store or stop at the advertiser store. And it's like, I wonder if even within the company, they feel like search and ads are in combat. They always have that. I mean, this is kind of what led a former Googler in the early days to coin their famous catchphrase, don't be evil.

29:29This was what don't be evil was about. It was about not compromising the integrity of what they were doing by reaching for the easy revenue. And over time, I think that they have just reached more and more for the easy revenue and have not thought enough about the health of the broader web ecosystem that ultimately they do depend on. So tell me about this most recent news. What happened? So this week at Google I.O., they laid out some changes to the way that search results will work. And there's the way that it will work in the near future, and then there's the way that it will work in the medium term.

30:08And the way that it's going to work in the near-term future, and in fact, a lot of people have had this feature already in preview, I've had it for several months now, is when you search for some things, Google will just show you an AI-generated summary of the results. So if you say something like, what's the best laptop I can buy right now? Before this feature rolled out, you would see a list of links to sites like Wirecutter that had done a lot of rigorous testing of laptops. Now, with what Google is calling AI overviews, it'll say like, here are some of the best laptops of 2024 as judged by experts.

30:44And they'll sort of look at 50 different companies that have written a page like this, and they will summarize it, and they will sort of show you in little footnotes, maybe who wrote that story. But most people, of course, are not going to click on those footnotes. They're just going to see a little summary. So why does that matter? Well, this is one of the places where publishers are still making money. They're able to put affiliate links if they do these sort of wire cutter style tests of products. And if people buy something because they read that webpage, then the publisher gets a little bit of a kickback.

31:20Now, those kickbacks are probably going to start going away too. And so this is just, again, one more place where publishers aren't going to see revenue. But it's actually much bigger than that because the real idea here, PJ, is that whereas browsing the web used to be considered something of a pastime, to older folks like you and me. Now it's being sort of presented as a chore, something that you shouldn't have to do, something that you should just let Google read the web for you, show you a bunch of results, and you'll never have to leave Google. So the reason that this is so important is this is really the first step toward you not having to visit the web anymore because Google is going to read the web for you.

32:00And I feel like what you just said is, let me put it this way. Put it this way. recently I had seen a different search engine. I think it was Perplexity that was sort of doing the same thing. And we talked about this on Search Engine. We were talking with Ezra Klein. I was like, this seems kind of bad. They're like taking the journalism, but they're not paying for it. What's going to happen to underlying journalism? That seemed like a moment. Google unveiling this functionality. Would you say this is a bigger deal? Yes. So I hated what Perplexity was doing. I hated what Arc Search, another company, was doing That was basically exactly the same thing.

32:35And the reason I hated it so much was that I knew that Google would do it. Because in some ways, it is a better user experience, right? There's a reason that people really like asking ChatGPT questions. And it is that they do not get a big research project back when they say, show me the best shoes, right? ChatGPT will just say, oh, if you're a man, here's like 10 kinds of shoes that should be in your wardrobe. Google will show you 4 ,800 links to websites. It's clear to me what is the better user experience, right? So I knew when I saw what Perplexity and ARK and some of these others were doing, that Google was going to feel pressure to do the same thing.

33:17But still, it had to happen. And then this week it happened. I wondered if Google wouldn't do the same thing because I feel like, okay, as a journalist, I understand why I don't want this to happen because it makes us less valuable. It makes our jobs more precarious. As an internet user, I understand why people, like I have used perplexity. I have found perplexity to be useful, but I also feel like I'm like pirating music, except for the thing I make, so I feel worse about it. Sorry, musicians. I thought Google might not do it because I'm like, yeah, in the short term, you're giving people a better user experience.

33:51But if you roll this thing out, and I don't know how to estimate how many journalists to lose their jobs from this. But 10%, 20%, 40%, you're killing the input for the machine that you need. And it seems that Google needs that machine more than a perplexity or an ARC. So I thought maybe they wouldn't. Yeah, and I do think that they will move a little cautiously here because to some degree, that is almost certainly true. If truly every publisher in the world went away and restaurants stopped creating websites and dry cleaners stopped posting their phone numbers online. This does create a problem for Google.

34:33I'm just not sure, one, that it's as big a problem for them as a journalist. I would like it to be. And two, they are going to be in control of this entire process, right? Like, they have their fingers on the knobs and the levers. And so they can just tweak it like 5 % this way or 10 % that way. They can see what happens. And if nothing really breaks for them, then they can dial in another 5 % or 10%. Every other business on the internet might be kicking and screaming the whole time, but there is almost truly nothing they can do because Google is in control. So to me, what this moment has meant is that on stage this week at Google I.O., the company essentially put the web into a state of managed decline, where they said, without saying it, that the web was really useful for 25 years, but we don't need it anymore.

35:32Because with generative AI, we'll be able to tell you anything that the web could have told you, and you're not even going to have to leave Google to get the information. You're not somebody who is like, one of the things you and I talk about sometimes, we're not talking into a microphone, but I guess also talking to a microphone, To be clear, we mostly talk to each other via microphones. Because that's just the relationship you've set up for us. But I feel like we're both tech journalists in our generation, for the most part, tend to be incredibly skeptical of tech companies, incredibly paranoid about what they're releasing.

36:08And with good reason. That's like earned skepticism, earned paranoia. I feel like you and I are a little bit unusual in that we're still sort of stubbornly... We have some optimism in us. We have some optimism in us. Like, my feeling about AI has been like, I'm not just going to, like, try to go destroy the machines with an axe. I want to see how this is good. I want to see how this is bad. And maybe this is just my solipsism where it's like, well, you weren't worried about Dolly, but now you're upset about this. But, like, it's unusual for me to hear you talk about things in this dire way. Yeah, and I'm a little nervous that I'm over-rotated here, right?

36:47And yet, if you look at the trajectory of the journalism industry since I got into it in 2002, it pretty much just is a line falling off a cliff. I want to say, correlation is not always causation. Not always causation. And I'm not saying it's all the internet's fault. I'm not even saying this was Google's job to fix this necessarily. It just did become the economic engine that powered the web. And so the moment when it says, this honestly just is not that important to us anymore, like regardless of what you think of, like whether that is good or bad or like what Google should have to do, it just is a big deal for publishers.

37:28You know, there's been some reporting on this In the Wall Street Journal, and analysts believe that publishers might lose between 20 and 40 % of their traffic over the next year as this stuff rolls out, right? Because we should say, what happened this week was Google took this AI overview experience that they've been testing. They've now rolled it out across the United States. By the end of the year, they say a billion people around the world are going to have it. So it's gone from this very small test to now a billion people are going to have it by December. and once that happens if people are really losing 20 to 40 percent of their traffic it just is going to be we're just going to see so many more publications go out of business last year a bunch of publications went out of business buzzfeed news vice as we know it the new gawker protocol sites that just kind of disappeared and when i think about the few and the proud big publishers that remain, if you walked into any of their C-suites and were like, what's your plan to have 40 % less traffic by December?

38:32I don't think anybody has a really good plan for that.

38:43After a short break, if Google shutting down a huge chunk of traffic to news sites is as big a deal as Casey fears, what are the possible solutions here? How can someone putting their work on the internet safeguard their ability to make a living? Let's after these ads.

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41:40Welcome back to the show. I have to say, I was feeling unusually defeated hearing Casey describe what he thought was about to happen with the internet. I wanted him to walk me through the possible solutions here. How other people were thinking about the problem of these AI bots chowing up the work of human beings and spitting out good enough summaries. Most things are fixable. I wondered what the possible fixes were. For instance, the most tried and true American response to anything, lawsuits. Couldn't journalists and publishers just sue Google or sue whoever's Napstering their work? So there is a big lawsuit filed by the New York Times against open AI, essentially for the same reasons.

42:25And that is now unfolding. It is an open legal question whether it can be permitted for a company like Google to go in and look at all of the articles that a publisher like Platformer has ever published and use those to train a large language model. The case for it being illegal is, hey, you're stealing my work. Knock it off. Don't do that. You're just taking my labor and using it to make something valuable. I don't want you to do that. So maybe it's illegal. The case that it is legal, though, is, I don't know, all of us are allowed to go and read webpages and form thoughts and do other things based on that information.

43:08And these LLMs are not reproducing what they are ingesting perfectly in most cases. And so are you really going to tell computers that they can't read the internet because guess what? Computers are already reading the internet in all sorts of ways. So this is just going to have to get litigated. But of course, all of the big tech companies are just making the bet that courts are going to side with the big corporations here and the publishers are going to be out of luck. Right. And it seems like of all the possible futures you could imagine, there's ones where the courts are like, you do kind of have to pay them some money.

43:40There's ones where they say, no, no, no, this is aggregation. This is what you guys were doing with humans. But there's no world where they say, turn off the machine. Some people do think that. Some people will say that ChatGPT and Google Gemini are like the fruit of a poisoned tree. That because you used all this copyrighted material in the creation of them, you will actually have to destroy them. But vanishingly few people I've spoken to think that is a likely outcome. You're a person who publishes on the internet. You're a publisher. You're not an enormous company, but you're someone who is swimming in the same ocean that you're worried is being destroyed.

44:16What does it mean for you? I can't figure that out yet. I had an opportunity back when Platformer was still on Substack. If you want to know why we're not there, that's another great story that you can Google. For now. And they had some kind of toggle where I could say, don't train your LLMs on Platformer, you rogues. And I didn't switch it on. Because number one, Platformer publishes like three articles a week, okay? we're a very low volume publisher. We've never, frankly, even relied on Google for very much of our travel. I started a newsletter because I didn't want to have to fight platform algorithms for the rest of my life.

44:55I just wanted to write about them. Yeah. So I've never thought that whatever happens in Google is necessarily going to be like curtains for a platform. In fact, sometimes I think I'm weirdly worked up for this given how little I actually expect this to affect me in the near term. Except that I love the web. I grew up on the web. The web brought me, like, everything that I have. And platformer is much better when there is more journalism for me to read and have thoughts about and inspire questions in me and, you know, send me chasing stories on my own. I don't think this is going to have a huge effect on me directly.

45:29But, like, indirectly, it feels like the only story. Yeah. Which is, what is the internet going to look like in five years? And you think it's that fast. This stuff is moving very quickly. Every few weeks, it seems, one of these AI makers comes out with a more efficient version of a model or a model that has been tuned for some specific purpose. Like maybe it's better at education or it's better at science or it's better at healthcare. And we're just kind of in that liftoff stage. And this stuff is starting to accumulate. These chatbot assistants are getting better and better. A lot of people probably watched the demo that OpenAI had this week where they've made this assistant that has this uncannily emotional voice.

46:23It's like actively flirting with you now. I was watching their videos. It's crazy. They had one. We did a story like last year about Andrew Leland, interviewing Andrew Leland about his blindness. And he was saying how he uses this app called Be My Eyes where you can connect with a human being and they will tell you like, hey, your shirt doesn't match your pants or whatever. And one of the things OpenAI demoed was this video where Be My Eyes is now AI-powered, and they were showing a person who did not have sight walking down the street, holding their phone, and their phone was saying, the cab's here, put your hand up.

46:55Buckingham Palace is in front of you. The flag indicates the king's there. And I'm like, I'm not against this. This is progress, this is amazing. I just want the work I love and the web I love to exist in the future. Yeah, another way I would put that is just like, I want the benefits to be a little bit more evenly distributed, right? I know that the majority of the spoils here are going to go to the companies that do the most innovation. And I'm basically fine with that. But again, when you flashback and think about what Google was like in the early 2000s, I just feel like we had a better bargain.

47:31We got a guide to the web that was really fast and easy to use and reliable. They got a bunch of advertising revenue. and there was a rising tide that was lifting all boats. And what I'm worried about is that tide has now sort of, I don't know, come in and washed out a lot of what was on the shore. And Google is going to be the last boat standing or whatever. I've sort of lost track of this metaphor. I don't know if Google is a boat now. It's gone completely away from me. But if you just sort of imagine them as a large thing that survived whatever I was talking about, that's what it would be. When we talked about this on Search Engine last, and it's weird, like, I really feel conflicted where I'm like, when you said that this feels to you like the only story in some ways, that's how I feel.

48:19And I'm like, I don't want to belabor people's patience with my curiosity with this, but it really feels like global warming's a bigger deal. Climate change is a bigger deal. But it feels like climate change for the thing I love, and it feels like it's happening so quickly, and it's very hard for me not to think about it a lot. When we spoke to Ezra about it, I was like, what do you do? And Ezra, being like an ethical person who believes that people should act ethically, was like, look, if you love journalism, it is incumbent on you to pay for it. And I agree. People should pay specifically for search engine and if they have money left over in their budget, they should pay for platformer or maybe search engine twice and platformer once.

48:56I pay for platformer. Thanks, PJ. Of course. I pay for search engine. Thank you. We're modeling good behavior to the internet. That also feels like yeah, people should do that. But it feels like the problem is larger than$5 a month. What do you think the solutions are? Well, I mean, set the journalist aside for it. I mean, this is something else I think is important to say so that people don't just think we're navel-gazing about our own industry. Google does not only deliver traffic to publishers. It's how people discover all sorts of businesses, right? You move to a new town, you need a dry cleaner, you need a dog walker, You want to know some cool restaurants or cool bars.

49:34Right now, imperfect as it is, all of those things can like jockey for a position. They can go to the search engine optimizers and they can get some tips. And hopefully if they're a really good restaurant or really good dry cleaner, they'll pop up to the top of search results. And they might not even have to buy a Google ad, right? Like they can compete just by being really good. We are talking about the beginning of a future where all of those webpages, whatever all those other businesses are doing to sort of wave their hands and say, hey, like we exist. That is all just getting subsumed into an even more complicated and mysterious set of algorithms that's just going to be spat out.

50:15And you're just going to be told, yeah, here's the three dry cleaners in your town. And hopefully one of those will be good. So I don't want to overly romanticize like the present state of affairs because I do think that SEO has like ruined a lot of things, but it still seems preferable to me to a world where there is just this kind of mystery AI giving you the answer to everything and actively discouraging you from visiting websites to make up your own mind. And I just keep going back to like at this conference this week, they just kept coming back to this phrase, let Google do the Googling for you.

50:53And what they were telling us was searching the web as a chore, using the internet as a chore, Google is now the thing that stops you from having to do that chore. Google is just going to be the Star Trek computer. It's going to tell you whatever you need to know. Don't worry about visiting the web anymore. And while they protested, that's not really what we meant, and we're still going to send lots of traffic, and we believe in the web, at the end of the day, I was like, no. You're telling us what you want to do. You've been building it for 20 years, and now you're really close. So I just think it's time that we take them seriously about that.

51:23What does it mean to take them seriously except for to worry? I have the best, worst, dorkiest answer to that question, PJ, which is that we have to finish building the Fediverse.

51:41Really? Yes. You're already so upset that I'm making you talk about this. And that's fine. You should be. We should all be upset that we have to talk about the Fediverse, but that's where Google has driven us to. Talk about the Fediverse, but in a way that my mom can understand it. Yeah. So the Fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves. It's a way to have an identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you can bring your own algorithm if you want to.

52:23I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fediverse is. Honestly, my mom is kind of a false flag in this because the truth is like, here's what I understand about the Fediverse. I understand that there were people who watched Twitter go up in flames and said, never again should one man be able to control the algorithm. And so from now on, among Twitter clones, of which there must now be 1 ,000, each one bad in its own specific way, the Fediverse means that you will be able to have an account that is not linked to any one of those sites and that I could post a boring post on threads, but it could be read by angry people on Blue Sky.

52:57The idea that these things are federated amongst each other but not centrally controlled. But honestly, if you said, keep explaining the Fediverse for five more minutes, I'd be like, I've run out of steam. I don't really get it. But that's pretty good, right? It's a collective term for these various web platforms that use open source and decentralized protocols to let different platforms communicate and interact across these different hosting services. That's probably about as technical as you need to go. But the way I think of it is, it's just a way to bring some humanity back to the internet.

53:35It's a way to sort of wrest it back from these giant mega tech platforms. It's a way to personalize things to your own liking, to like sort of customize them. And so it is starting with these social platform. Mastodon was the first thing in the Fediverse. Threads, which is actually now much bigger than Mastodon, is a meta product, but it is part of the Fediverse. Flipboard is joining it. WordPress is joining it. Ghost, which is this hosting provider that I use for Platformer, is going to join it. And so someday you might just like have an app on your phone and instead of just going to Google to see what's the news of the day, you just open up your app that links you to the Fediverse.

54:15And you might be following some publishers there. You might be following some creators there. There might be some ads in it. So those folks are getting money. Maybe you do pay a subscription to some of the publishers in there. So you get to see all of their paywall posts and they just kind of show up right in your feed. And while there's a lot to figure out in terms of how do you create a good user experience? How do you make that kind of more fun and useful than Google? That just kind of feels like the direction to go to me. Because instead of one giant walled garden that is just keeping you there, keeping all the revenue for itself, it is a way of rebuilding a web where there's just a lot of organic connections between people and publishers who like each other and have ways about how we can make and share money with each other.

55:00And so if it works, we're going to have something, I think, that feels much better than the world we have today. But could it work? It feels like, this is like so under-informed and I should not be saying it into a microphone and putting it on the internet, and maybe I won't. But it feels like one of those ideas where you're like, yeah, it'd be nice, but things that are civic and volunteer and parks that end up being trashed and then everybody just goes to the mall, do you think it could really work? Here's my case that it could work. Threads is an app that has 150 million monthly users. It is 10 months old, and it is part of the Fediverse.

55:41So that means, as hard as it is to believe, 150 million people every month are in the Fediverse. For the most part, they don't know about it, and they don't care. And that's actually a great sign. Because as we've just established, through our tortured explanations of the Fediverse, nobody wants to understand what it is or how it works. So we're already working on one of the biggest problems with the Fediverse. And the thing is, PJ, I'm not the only person who's worried about this. You know, yesterday, I met with two folks. One is a guy, Eugene Rochko, who's the founder of Mastodon. The other guy is Mike McHugh, who's the co-founder of Flipboard.

56:20And these two guys are running at this Fediverse stuff at 100 miles an hour. And the main thing they wanted to let me know was just how many other people are building this stuff with them, right? There's a lot of old timers and even young people around who remember the early promise of the internet, who remember how exciting it was that we were going to have this thing that was decentralized, that was open, that shared the wealth with a lot of people. And they're going out and they're picking off these name brand websites like WordPress and Tumblr, you know, The Verge, the site where I used to work.

56:53They're pushing into federation. So at this moment, is it a crazy band of insufferable, obnoxious rebels? Absolutely. But I ask you, PJ, what movement in the history of the world has not begun with a band of insufferable and obnoxious rebels? I can't think of one. Okay, so maybe the Fediverse saves us. It might be the Fediverse. I mean, look, a lot of people are going to use Google. Again, one of the reasons why I'm so mad, PJ, is that this is going to work, okay? It's like, I'm mad because it feels like game over. I'm mad because most people are going to be totally happy to get the sort of Star Trek computer answer and not give two thoughts to any of the labor that went into producing the answer.

57:39And I'm sure Google will have a great business for itself. But like some of the people that worked at Google in the early days were really idealistic about what the web could be. And I believed in that optimism and I'm not ready to give up on it. So if that means that I have to learn what the Fediverse is and explain it to other people, that's what I'm going to do because a better world has got to be possible here. Casey, you're making me feel things. I'll tell you this. I felt things talking to Eugene and Mike yesterday. I was honestly shocked at how emotional I was at Google. Like it felt weird that I was as upset as I was walking around this developer conference.

58:17And I think I was upset because I felt gaslit, honestly, because nobody at Google would just stand up and say, we actually do have a long-term plan to replace most web visits with our wild garden. So that's kind of why I was mad. But I was also really just pessimistic about the future. Then I sat down with those two, and they were like, here are the next three things that we're going to build. And here's the next three big platforms that we're going to go after and get them to federate. And I'm like, this might work too, because the thing about Google taking most of the winnings of the internet for itself is there's a lot of other people on the internet that would also like to eke out a living.

58:53And they're highly motivated to make it work for them. So there will always be a rebel alliance. And I would not count them out because companies that are old and have a lot of money, they get really lazy. and they can't move as quickly as sometimes they need to adapt to the future. So, you know, if the Fediverse folks can build a better future that is truly more fun to use, it'll be really small for a while relative to the size of Google, but there's no reason why it couldn't grow very large in the end. All right, Casey, I'll see you on the Fediverse.

59:32Do you have a Fediverse account? Are you on Mastodon.social? Okay, so I started a Mastodon account and then I forgot the password. Yeah, that's the single most common story about the Fediverse, by the way. Really? Pretty much. I went on threads and I was like, this is very boring. You do post there. I see your threads post. Don't pretend you're above threads. I post episodes of Search Engine, but I don't like hang out and make funny jokes. Well, maybe you should try it. Maybe you'd enjoy it. Maybe I'll try to make a joke on threads and see how it feels. Casey, thank you for talking about the past and future of the internet we have loved.

1:00:05You're welcome.

1:00:09Casey Newton. His newsletter platformer is essential to understanding our quickly changing internet. You can also find him on the wonderful weekly technology podcast, Hard Fork, with his co-host, Kevin Roos. Did we do a good enough job explaining the Fediverse this week? I feel like I'm still a little confused by it, so maybe you're also still a little bit confused by it. As far as I can tell, one way to think of the problem of Google search is that it's a problem of monopoly. If the internet had more than one popular search engine, the entire web wouldn't have been somewhat corrupted by trying to appeal to Google.

1:00:44And Google wouldn't then have had to replace many of its useless web results with AI summaries. On a federated internet, people with followers can take their followers with them from platform to platform. So maybe that internet resists monopoly more easily? I don't know. Honestly, I'm still a little confused how that fixes search and AI. You know what? If people want more Fediverse Talk, email us, and we'll consider revisiting this in a future episode. If you want less Fediverse Talk, email us and let us know, too. How in the weeds should this show go is a question for you to help us answer. Journalism is a service industry.

1:01:22You can reach us at searchengine.show. After the break, we have a podcast recommendation, which has to do with the themes of this episode. Stick around.

1:01:35Thank you.

1:02:10Thank you.

1:02:44So, as we've been thinking about Google's effect on the internet, and about small publishers trying to survive, we've been closely watching the launch of one of my favorite new news websites, 404 Media. They cover the internet, they are brilliant reporters, and they're a small, independent outfit like us. They feel like a canary to me. Like, if they can make a business succeed online, I'm a little bit less worried about the future. And I know other journalists who are watching 404 with the same question right now. What's relevant here, though, is that the team at 404 are very much at the mercy of Google's algorithms.

1:03:22And recently, they posted an episode where they just talked candidly about what it's like for a small group of humans to try to survive while fighting AI websites that are constantly scraping their work. You should go listen to that episode. It's called Why Google is Shit Now. I found it really fascinating, and it just goes way more in-depth to answer the question a lot of people have. How come even before this AI thing, Google search just seemed to mostly stop working? You can find out there. I'm going to put a link in our show notes. Also, as we mentioned last episode, we are right now heading towards the end of season one of Search Engine.

1:03:59We're doing a board meeting with all of our paid subscribers on Friday, May 31st, to discuss show business. That's business about the show, not news about Hollywood. The meeting, Friday, May 31st, 1 p.m. Eastern Time. We will be sending out a Zoom link to join week of. This is only for our paid subscribers, people who are members of Incognito Mode. If you're not signed up, there's still time. Go to searchengine.show. You can also send us questions there that you'd like to hear answered at this board meeting. And if you sign up, you'll get a lot of other stuff, which you can read about on our website.

1:04:32Again, that URL is searchengine.show. If you're a paid subscriber, look out for an email with a link next week and mark your calendar, May 31st, 2024, 1 p.m. Eastern.

1:04:50Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinnamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum.

1:05:26at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.

1:05:59you