As AI Kills Search Traffic, Google Launches Offerwall To Boost Publisher Revenue (techcrunch.com) 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads.
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year. While no broad case studies were shared, India's Sakal Media Group implemented Google Ad Manager's Offerwall feature and saw a 20% revenue boost and up to 2 million more impressions in three months. Overall, publishers testing Offerwall experienced an average 9% revenue lift, with some seeing between 5% and 15%.
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year. While no broad case studies were shared, India's Sakal Media Group implemented Google Ad Manager's Offerwall feature and saw a 20% revenue boost and up to 2 million more impressions in three months. Overall, publishers testing Offerwall experienced an average 9% revenue lift, with some seeing between 5% and 15%.
Yeah but aren't those numbers after (Score:2)
I'm confused how this would generate more revenue beyond being another plug-in for displaying ads. As far as I can tell the user is still have to browse your website and the whole problem is AI summaries are stopping people before they browse and chat GTP is sometimes keeping them from even getting to Google.
Plus We already know micropayments don't work. We've known that for 30 years now. There's no reliable way to transfer a few pennies and as soon as you get
Re: (Score:2)
But this just looks like a really advanced version of the existing Google advertising platforms.
Yep. What is happening is that publishers of all kinds (including people running private web pages) are in a fight for survival. Incidentally, so is Google, even if they have not realized it. Because what sources will all that needed training data come from when they cannot steal if from the web as the web has died?
[citation needed] (Score:4, Insightful)
How about having Google "pay" the sites used to compose the LLM message by listing the citations?
Re: (Score:2)
This is the reasonable approach to this, but I suspect the way that LLMs work makes it difficult if not prohibitive.
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How about having Google "pay" the sites used to compose the LLM message by listing the citations?
You mean the very thing they do today? In that box to the right of the AI search summary? The box with all the references in it?
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Aren't they doing it? At least Perplexity adds citation links to each claim on the LLM message. That's the difference to Chatbots, that these tools actually put a link where the information come from, so you can find more and/or find out of the source is not reputable.
micropayments (Score:2)
The only reason they are able to push this at all is because of their monopolistic negotiating power in the ad industry.
doomed to fail (Score:2)
Oh, so I can {checks notes} do the same kinds of things I actively block and avoid, like take polls and watch ads, in order to have to search for content amongst a sea of monetized garbage?
No thanks.
Media strip mall (Score:4, Insightful)
Google provides the "presses", just add content.
It will go poorly, we'll end up with fewer, bigger propaganda outlets, and Google will get bored with this in a few years and kill it.
Re: Media strip mall (Score:2)
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How about links (Score:2)
Why not put links (and not just tiny icons, but Wikipedia-like links of whole words or even sentences) to wherever the AI got the information?
Then it is *both* a search engine and an AI overview.
Re: How about links (Score:2)
You're assuming they're rational and not greedy bastards.
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Because most (all?) current LLMs cannot do that. I get complete failure to find sources quite frequently with ChatGPT. What it actually does is not search its real sources, but it tries to do a classical web-search to find sources. That is fundamentally broken.
Oh great (Score:2)
Re: Oh great (Score:2)
Sounds like they want to turn the entire internet into youtube, with preloaded ads.
Re: Oh great (Score:2)
Surveys? Really? (Score:2)
This isn't the 90s anymore, Google.
This is not a valid answer to the problem at hand. (Score:2)
So Google stole content from publishers and now they tell publishers to shove more advertising shite onto their websites to benefit Google even more.
Besides, if users never visit publishers' website, who exactly is going to be seeing all these new ads and gimmicks?
Used to be So Cool to be in AdSense FedEx Club (Score:3)
Google Classic (Score:3)
If they want traffic back, they should bring back the Google search from 10 years ago, the one that produced proper and relevant website results.
The writing is on the wall... (Score:1)
It's obvious that AI will make the Google Search business model obsolete. Who on earth will still want to sift through all those pages/sites when you can get an AI to do it for you? The way ChatGPT is "monetized" is that you pay them money to use it (shock! horror!). People should welcome this. When you pay money for a product, the product is the product. When you use an ad-sponsored product for free, YOU are the product.
What Google should do is drop advertising and require a $/month subscription to us
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And how will people and organizations will be motivated to publish anything in that world? Right. Eventually it will just be old data and AI slop in these "knowledge engines".
Sounds fake (Score:2)
Or rather an attempt to placate them for a few years, until it gets cancelled like basically any Google project. I expect the publishers will not be stupid enough to fall for that, because the way AI is used byt Google and others is an attampt to destroy the web and replace it by somethign entirely under their control.