data privacy

How Google and AI are Killing Travel Blogs Like Mine

I just finished reading this blog post by Amanda Williams, a travel blogger of 15 years, on the impact of Google's "helpful content" algo changes and AI on her ability to financial sustain herself.

And man- I might sound dumb here, but I totally had not connected the dots re: how AI will absolutely destroy ad revenue for creators-- specifically creators that produce written content. 

Ad placement is driven by site visitors, and AI totally bypasses the need for a site visit. Instead, it harvests the information from blogs like Amanda's and puts it in a neat list along with the content of 10 other bloggers so a person trying to find the top sites to visit in Paris never needs to even visit the site. 

This is a problem in that, bloggers like Amanda have to switch strategies-- she now needs a new means of making money to continue producing trustworthy travel content. That might be creating a substack with individual subscribers, creating courses, etc. But her content likely won't be publicly available in the future, non-harvestable by AI... and that's a problem too in that AI's knowledge sources are going to get worse and worse. 

Also, I just can't imagine that the 1:1 subscriber model won't be a losing game for soooo many great writers/creators. It's very different to be a person creating content that people are willing to pay for month over month, especially in niche fields like travel, instead of being paid by relevant brands through ads. 

What do y'all think?

Can someone actually have any Teal if they score 0% Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta? Going through the scores of the Better Political Conversations quiz is fascinating. (reference: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/we0q1pq/run)

Now, this very well could have been someone running an experiment to test the scoring, or to try to get a sense of a friend or family member, but they did give a name where a lot of people leave that blank.

Their scores are:
Teal 55%
Green 45%
Orange 0%
Amber 0%
Red 0%
Magenta 0%

Is it at all possible that someone could select every single response at Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta as False, wrong, or just doesn’t make sense and have any actual Teal?

Also interesting, I got an email from someone who thinks of himself as primarily Orange, but was surprised that his quiz results came out 0% Orange. He referenced his Meyers-Briggs results as a reference in support. Utterly fascinated, I’ve asked him to let me know what correlation he sees between the Integral levels and Meyers-Briggs, and I’ve asked him what statements at Orange would have had his quiz results come out accurate for him.

Each time I make a significant edit in the content of the project I make a note of the change in the google sheet where I’m keeping track of scores. Here are the averages of the currently 75 scores:

Amber 26%
Green 25%
Teal 21%
Red 12%
Orange 11%
Magenta 5%

One blatant pattern I’m seeing is that high Green scores ALWAYS pair with a high score in Amber, and that people who have that pairing always score exceedingly low in Red and quite low in Orange.