information theory

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?

Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.