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HouseFresh Clears The Air On Google’s Changing Search Experience
00:47:11
Product review site HouseFresh bounced back from losing 91% of its Google traffic last year. Here’s how it’s pivoting in response to stiffer affiliate marketing competition and zero-click AI search.
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
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B
The big tech platforms that dominate content discovery are determined to keep the Internet's traffic for themselves. And publishers are facing an existential crisis as their referrals are lost to zero click AI search. Now generative AI is coming for shopping recommendations, threatening e commerce revenue for publishers of all sizes. Between the rise of AI shopping assistance and the Googles and metas of the world constantly changing their algorithms, it's becoming a struggle for pubs to get seen, let alone get paid. But one small site that was previously known just for air purifier reviews has been helping its peers make sense of these winds of change. On this week's episode of Ad Exchanger Talks, we've got House Fresh in the house, and we'll be getting real about the web's challenges and maybe some of its opportunities as well. I'm Anthony Vargas, senior editor for Ad Exchanger, filling in for our usual host, Alison Schiff. And joining me today is Gisele Navarro, managing editor at House Fresh.
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A
Hi, everybody. Hi, Anthony. Thank you so much for having me.
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B
Giselle, thanks so much for joining the pod. All right, we've got just a little bit of business to take care of before we kick things off. Ad Exchangers Programmatic IO New York will be here before you know it. It's taking place September 29th to 30th in New York City. We'll be covering all the hot topics, agentic AI curation, CTV retail media, and plenty more. And we've got a special discount code for a podcast, audience. You can get 25% off the price of admission using the code PODCRUSH. That's all one word. And try entering it in all caps because that's how I've got to type that in front of me. Okay, let's dive on in. So, Giselle, we like to start our episodes of Ad Exchanger Talks off with a fun question. And as someone who edits a site about air purifiers, I have to ask you, what's the freshest air you've ever breathed?
- [02:18]
A
Freshest air. I'm a brief, I think probably in my country in Argentina, in the south, in Patagonia, being next to a glacier. And it was pretty. It was fresh and chilly. So that must have been it.
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B
That sounds absolutely fantastic right about now.
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A
Yes.
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B
So let's dig in here. For those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with House Fresh, what can you kind of tell us about the site and your monetization strategy?
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A
Yeah, so the site, we started working on it at the end of 2019. It took us a year to have enough content and enough reviews to put it live, which was bad timing because obviously there was a pandemic in the middle. So it will have been great for the world and for us to be able to be live before, but since then we have monetized the site through affiliate revenue. We buy, test and review air quality products. Our number one product is air purifiers, but we also work with air quality sensors and dehumidifiers. And we had plans to, to go after other products that have to do with the quality of the air in the house. But yeah, unfortunately we were caught up in whatever happened to the Google algorithm at the end of 2023. And that kind of shifted everything for us.
- [03:57]
B
Yeah, and the thing that really brought housefresh to a wider audience beyond those looking for air purifier recommendations were those posts that you started publishing last year about those, you know, Google algorithm changes and about how big name publishers were gaming Google's algorithm to push their affiliate sites up to search rankings. What prompted you to raise the alarm on that?
- [04:18]
A
So when I think it was around September 2023 when we started seeing our traffic drop for some pages that were big for us, like, you know, best budget air purifiers, where we, we got to leave our mission of actually finding the best cheap options for people. And we started seeing that the sites that were ranking were sites that were big media, so, you know, owned by big publishing houses or even newspapers and magazines like their digital version, and they were ranking for pages that were not even focused on budget products. So they were recommending Dyson devices that cost $1,000 and that was served to people who were looking specifically for cheap options. So we started digging through the results of what we were seeing, ranking and then we started talking with other websites that also review products in other spaces. And then we went beyond just review product review sites and talking with websites in travel and in home and, and finding out that across all of us, we were all seeing big media outranking us with content that wasn't as thorough. It wasn't in many cases even targeting the queries. And that's when we noticed, okay, well, something is going on. Something is going on with the algorithm and something is going on with these big publishing houses and there, there has to be, there is big business here happening. And all of us, where we're seeing, you know, our websites completely disappearing from search results at this, at the same time.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah. And, you know, a lot of, like, you know, there were kind of like a bunch of changes that Google had made to its search algorithm, like you alluded to at the end of 2023 and in early 2024. That in some ways we're trying to, like, correct that problem, but in other ways, we're also making it worse. So what are maybe two or three of those big changes Google made in the past two years that every publisher needs to know about, if they don't already?
- [06:32]
A
Okay, so I guess the big wave of updates happened between September 2023 and December 2023. So within those three, four months, there were, I don't know, like, 10 different updates that happened at the time Google used to have all these different elements of the algorithm. So you will have a product review update that was just looking at product reviews, and then you will have the spam update. I was just trying to remove spam. And then the helpful content update was just trying to. I don't know what I was trying to do. I guess just push helpful content forward. I don't know. And all of these updates will work separately from the core update. And at the beginning of 2024, what Google did is they brought all of these different updates or these different elements of their algorithm, and they rolled it out into the core update. So the way that they would explain is like they baked it in or something. So anything that at the time, Google had been training all these different elements of their algorithm on to try to uncover better product reviews that had original data and firsthand testing all of that, and then content that was actually authoritative and based on expertise, and all of these elements of these different updates that they used to roll out, they all got just under the one umbrella of the core update. And since then, Google has been running mainly core updates and spam updates. So I guess the big thing has been the way that they presented, trying to show helpful content, or then that changed to satisfying content for users. So that's a big thing that we got to visit Google's headquarters and spend the day with engineers. And they just kept talking about that, about satisfying users. So I think that's what definitely they have been trying to put a finger on what that means. And yeah, a big question that they kept posing to us every time we were presenting with another issue that we were finding with the algorithm was like, well, how can a robot see that? As in, okay, as a human, it's easy to see what's wrong with something or what's not accurate or perhaps find inconsistencies. But how can a robot, how can the algorithm see that? So I guess somebody said that Google is like a blind five year old, which is a horrible thing to think about, but it kind of makes sense when you see how it works. And I think the last few years have been intense because obviously they've been preparing for whatever is happening now with AI and. Yeah, and along the way I guess a lot of spam has showed up, so they had to deal with that. And I guess many sites got caught up and others that were seen as reputable by the algorithm got benefited greatly by that too.
- [09:48]
B
Yeah, and you know, like, you kind of, you know, alluded to, you have visited and like met with like, you know, Google personnel about this. Like, did you get any kind of like, satisfying responses from the Google people in terms of like, what was going on and like how you could adapt to it, or are you kind of just left to your own devices without a lot of support?
- [10:10]
A
I mean, it's tough. I think what we learned was that they are very disconnected internally as a company. We kept a lot of. It wasn't just us. There were 20 independent web creators across different industries and with different monetization strategies and different types of websites. And a vast majority of us have pivoted to YouTube over the last year. And we kept saying YouTube is great because we get so much data and it's live data and it's so clear to us when something works and when it doesn't and we can figure things out. And perhaps Google could give us more data because now that the search console is nice, but analytics is a nightmare and it's so difficult to see things. And the answers were constantly, you know, YouTube, I don't know what's happening on YouTube. And we had to show them and explain to them and they had no idea. There was a group of, I think it were travel sites and they had people from Google who didn't know what search console was and they had to show them, like, oh yeah, this is what we use to see how things are going. And they, they are very much islands within the company. So we were lucky that in our group, which we were all product review sites, I think the majority of them were engineers from search that had been working within product reviews and they had also been working with FAQ content or forum content, stuff like that. So they were a lot more savvy. But I think their view of everything we were pushing forward, that how about we try this or have you thought about looking At, I don't know, creating a creator program the same way that YouTube has it. I think all of the answer was constantly the same, which is like, well, the bad actors are going to pretend that they are real then, or the bad actors as in the spammers. It seems to be a huge issue. And there was a point when I just asked one of the engineers, like, don't you have a spam team? Can't they just deal with it? If you are search engineers, can you just focus on, you know, making search better and then the spam team focuses on the spam and then you don't have to be constantly stopping yourself from even trying something. And I didn't get an answer to that other than if you were to see it was something like, if you were to see how bad things are, you would understand. So I came back from that trip thinking, okay, well, it's gone. Whatever stability we have from search traffic from Google, let's not count on that at all. If it comes back, that's great. It's not going to change my plans to actually diversify, which it was in the cards all along. Obviously, everybody wants to diversify the traffic. It's not like, oh, now people figure out everybody always wants to have a direct line to, you know, to, to the readership or visitors or users or customers or whatever it is that you're trying to service. But I think after that trip it was like, okay, well, the idea of, you know, Google being this big avenue through which traffic flows freely, and this was before AI overviews and before when AI overviews got rolled out, it was like, okay, well, that's it, I'm out. I'm so out right now. So since then, we have been encouraged to keep sharing examples of things that we thought were weird. So I personally have not really. I share my examples publicly. I don't like this idea of, oh, you have an email address that I can send stuff to and if it gets fixed or I just don't think that's fair and I don't feel comfortable doing that. And I'd rather tell everybody about it and if you want to fix it, good on you. So I just kept being public about it. And we have seen improvements in our space for sure. And then other small websites have also seen improvements, particularly over the last algorithm update and the one before. But in many cases those improvements were lost within just a few weeks. So it's still very shaky.
- [14:32]
B
Yeah. And to the point you raised about kind of washing your hands a bit of like, you know, search Traffic and just kind of like being like, well we have to diversify in other ways because this just is nowhere near as like dependable as it used to be. You've done a lot of really great work documenting even before like you know, some of the latest algorithm changes and like the current rise of like these like AI overviews, how the strategy that some of the big publishers have really been taking in terms of like zeroing in on certain search terms, especially if they have like a lot of affiliate marketing potential or a strong audience intent signal for advertisers and then really kind of dominating their results for those search terms. Like when, when I saw your piece that detailed Dot Dash Meredith's keyword swarming strategy, I was like, you know, damn, I wish I wrote this. You know, so, so given that competition from the big guys, you also wrote about how like House Fresh is like stop trying to compete on certain keyword searches that used to be big traffic drivers. Can you give us a sense of how like those big pubs were swooping in and dominating those search keywords and why it' viable for smaller publishers to compete anymore on those?
- [15:39]
A
So I had a, I don't know, like a whistleblower I guess who reached out to me after the first article and he explained the. Or she, because I don't know what it was, explained this keyword swarming strategy which then I did some fact checking with people I knew and I was told that this is not just this particular media house. It's a strategy of the ones that own multiple properties. They would keep an eye out for potential spaces they could get in basically. And as soon as they would find, as you were saying, a term that the competition was just small sites, they will come in, they will create not much content but enough across a number of their properties to be able to take over the first page of results. And what we have seen over the last few years is that there is one space for an independent publisher you just don't have right now, particularly in the product space where we are, you have big media which out of if there were to be 10 links, which there aren't anymore, but if there were to be 10 links, I would say probably six go to big media, one goes to an independent and the remaining three are usually retail and the percentage changes and it might be that it's like five to retail and four to big media, but it's constantly now Reddit. So Reddit now took over an entire chunk of the serps. So I think for small publishers like our ask what we can do that. None of them bother to do is actual reviews. So when Big Media comes and says, oh yeah, we review products, what they mean is we just write a list of these are the best and we just put some photos on there and that's it. And they don't review products. And a lot of people actually do want to before they buy. They want to read a review or they want to watch a video of a review and that's where they find us. Another thing that Big Media doesn't do is they don't really. They write an article and they leave it there. They might change a date, they might change a couple of words. There might be a new product with a high affiliate commission that they replace at some point, but they don't stay on top of products. So when we go, we are constantly looking for what's new and that's the space for us to come in. What usually happens is during the initial period of whatever new product, we are always there. And then eventually as Big Media starts reviewing or creating their lists, they start taking over or they just write one article about like, oh, this Amazon favorite is 50% off. And then suddenly they outrank our entire review with that. So I think there are these little windows of opportunity. And another thing that for us has worked and the only page that we always kind of kept, except for the, whatever, six, nine months that we were completely shadow banned, that we weren't even showing up for our name, it was air purifiers for weed smoke. Because weed smokers who smoke indoors, particularly winter, they want an air purifier. Sometimes neighbors of weed smokers want an air purifier and Big media doesn't get in there. So. So that's a space that is like, well, you know, they're not going to come in here. And we actually can't test this. And you know, we are more authoritative in any, in most ways because we have all the devices and everything. So in that particular space of the web, we compete with, you know, people who actually review, I don't know, grow tents and other things that have to do with weed, which it's completely fair. But if tomorrow Running Stone or Billboard or one of them decides that they want to do or Forbes weed smoke, whatever, they're probably going to outrank us. So I think it's just finding those windows of opportunity of where are they not going to go, what are the links that they're not going to go because that's where people can find us. Maybe they can find a recommendation on their site, but then they will go searching for the review and that's when they find you.
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B
And yeah, I mean, you've done a really awesome job painting a picture of the challenges for smaller publishers amid all these kind of search changes. I spend a lot of time covering the big digital publishers. Meredith who was doing that, swarming strategy included, and Meredith in particular. They're interesting. They're a publicly traded company, so we get a lot of periodic updates about how they're feeling about their business and what challenges they're facing. And over the past year, they've been very vocal about blaming Google's algorithm changes and embrace of AI search for hurting their business as well. So, like, what does that say about search as a sustainable traffic source for all publishers going forward, if even the big guys have their gripes?
- [20:51]
A
I think over the last few months I've seen more big media coming out against Google than in the last 10 years. Here in the UK, there's the press Gazette and every day there's a new report about a new, you know, UK newspaper coming out to say something. I mean, it's such a strange time at the moment. I think the web is in a very strange place. And for a lot of people, they always felt like the web was this disconnected thing from reality. Like, if you work online, it's not a real job and, you know, whatever happens online is just not like offline. Like it's not real, but it's been in our lives long enough that actually it is very real. And every time, in the case of Google, there's an algorithm update that wipes out websites. Those are jobs lost. Like, we hired an entire team of people. We had to, you know, let go. So. So I think we were perhaps we went through this golden age of the web of people going online to find information and being willing to search and click and read and fact check and all of these things that for our generation, and I don't know how old you are, but I imagine that we are kind of in the same generation, we got used to that. And actually we are very skeptics. I would see something, and I want to read that at least three times before I believe that that's what happened. And because when you just come in online, when I came as a child, you didn't make. You didn't know what was, who was who. At the time, everything was anonymous as well. Like, then we went through the change of actually, you know, the brands came on board and then people put their names on and social media happened and all of that And I think now people have been encouraged over the last year or two to just ask the question, get the answer done. And I think the chatbots have done a lot of that. I think AI overviews right now and AIM o are just deepening very quickly that new behavior in people where they don't scroll down, they just get the answer and they go. And even when I wrote the last article about AIO reviews, I got so many emails from people saying, oh, I haven't thought about that. I hadn't thought that. When I just read the inverse, the information, and I don't click, I'm actually a website could die. And it's like, yeah, the ecosystem was built around. We create the content and you benefit from the fact that that exists and everybody benefits from the traffic. And we monetize that traffic and we find ways to do that. And even in that space, even though we don't do advertising on our site, there is a symbiotic relationship, you know, between advertisers and the brands and the websites and the search engines and the social media platforms. And I think all of that is being disrupted at speed. And whilst that's happening, I think there's so much confusion and there's people who are, you know, blocking and paywalling their entire website. There's people who are, you know, removing themselves from the index. There's the whole cloudflare initiative. I know mediavine yesterday released a new initiative, but there is so much chaos. And through it all, I think people are shaping their behavior without realizing. And the only thing we can do as publishers is try to strengthen the relationship with the people that already know about us. And for anybody who comes to our site, for them to. For us to be memorable enough that they want to come back and make it easy for them to subscribe, if there is such a thing, and to like and to share and to all of those things that we know we have to do anyway. But the idea of just like this rinse and repeat traffic visitor of I don't care is the number. It's a thousand, it's three thousand, it's five thousand. That's every person that comes on the site is. It's an opportunity for the long run and that's how we should see them.
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B
Yeah, well said. And then, you know, kind of looking at, like, the impacts of, like, all this, all these issues that we've discussed on House Fresh in particular, last May, you wrote that that Google's algorithm changes at the end of 2023 and early 2024. Combined with that competition from bigger publishers and you know, House Fresh also basically like being de indexed from Google search for a period of like months essentially resulted in house fresh losing 91% of its traffic. How have things changed since then?
- [25:37]
A
Yeah, so I've got much better. So we were at the time I wrote that, I think we were getting like 50 to 100 people a day from getting 5,000, which might seem like very little, but for us it was a lot because it's a very small niche. And from then, I think the articles kept us going for a long time and people were finding us through the articles and from there they were recommending to other people and the articles kept being shared on Reddit and platforms and newsletters that really started growing our brand recognition and our brand mentions beyond the air purifier space. Because in the air purifier and the air quality space, we were already a brand. We are one of two websites that do this. So we started reaching new audiences. And then in August last year there was a car update and that's when we started to see our reviews ranking again. We started to see some of our big best recommendation pages ranking again. And we went and we started to create, like you were saying at the beginning, we said, well, we're not even going to try to compete. We were like, no, I'm going to go and I'm going to try to compete. Mainly because a Google engineer said to us, that's too competitive, like best air purifiers, that's too competitive. And I was like, well, I should be allowed to compete. Why am I not allowed to compete? So then we went and we created our best of page. And then we spent so much time on our main Air Purifiers page, which if you look at it, it's like a guide to air purifiers. And you have brands and you much stuff there that people spend like eight minutes on average on that page. And we, we started to, I don't know, get a bit bigger and feel, feel a bit bigger and start driving people from, from YouTube as well to the site. And right now we are around maybe like between 2.5 to 3k visitors a day. On a good day we might have like 3.5k. But it's still, we're still not nowhere near the 5000 we were at before. But those 5000 included a lot of informational content that we completely took out. We were like, I'm not going to feed your AI. Like, fine, I'm only going to create. I'm Creating video for this stuff. I'm incorporating this into other pages. But we took out a lot of content. So a lot of that traffic that we lost, I think now it wouldn't come back because those pages don't exist. But I feel like the traffic we don't have now, it spends a lot more time on the site. And I don't think it's because Google sends more qualified traffic. I think it's just because we spent so much more time thinking about what I was saying earlier of how can we make people stay longer, how can we give people more to do on the page, how can we make it easier for them to do what they already want to do? We noticed they searched, they immediately go and start searching for brands. So we move the search bar, we made it bigger, we put it at the top of the site and doing those type of little changes and testing constantly, like what's happening with this page. We just made this change and keep, keep, keep an eye on it for like a couple of weeks and then be like, well what about if we add this other thing and this is working this other page and so on. I think that has really helped. And then the YouTube channel, which grew a lot, that also helped us drive more awareness around the brand.
- [29:15]
B
So the main kind of like method for monetizing your traffic is still affiliate revenue. Correct. And House Fresh doesn't run any display ad advertising on its site. Why not look at running display ads on the site and is that something you might reconsider or is that just like a hard no for House Rush?
- [29:39]
A
I think there's a part of us, so it's very important for us to be unbiased. So that means that we don't do any brand collaborations with manufacturers, we don't accept devices. If we do have, for example, now we have this commercial air purifier for schools, which is basically a fridge size air purifier that we are getting it on loan and we're sending it back. And those are very few situations where we have this different agreement with a manufacturer. But even then, before they even send us anything, we're like, we're going to say we're going to show our data and you might not like our data and we're going to offer you an opportunity to comment on the data. But just because you are sending us something and we're going to send it back doesn't mean that we're going to say it's great. So I think advertising there is that line of we don't want to have a best something and people suddenly be served a Dyson or whatever advertising shark or whoever is paying for advertising. And that is like, it kind of muddies the water in a way when it comes to our mission and the way that we present the work we do. So that's one thing then we like as I said earlier, we think about, and since the very beginning, we think about traffic, we think about people, we want them to have a good experience on the site. We know that when you come jumping from big media to whatever other affiliate sites to every other part of the web, it just feels polluted in terms of ads. There's so much and you have to close it and these things open and there's a video that autoplays and you're trying to find and read a paragraph in between. So they love, know how it's fresh and it's relaxing and you can spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes reading and it's fine. And we believe that that's, that's, that's a good experience for the user. We're probably, you know, we're, we're losing out. I'm sure it could be, it could be beneficial for us now that the traffic is growing to try to get ads on the page. But I think we are putting that user experience higher. We are prioritizing it. And also the whole idea of putting a cookie in somebody's, you know, back pocket and let them be tracked, it just feels like we're selling, selling out people, you know. So yeah, I mean, I'm great to say that in this podcast with you, but no, no, trust me, you don't ask me the question.
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B
You nailed all of the main concerns about, about web advertising and display advertising and publishers ramping up ads to try and wring as much revenue as they possibly can from their traffic and just ruining the site experience. Like those are all super top of mind concerns for our, our audience and you know, the entire industry and you know, one, one place that House Fresh is running ads is on your YouTube content. What's been like, effective there? Like, is that just like kind of like a thing that, you know, like is the YouTube platform just like it just kind of runs itself or do you have to like really kind of like be deliberate about how you're trying to, you know, approach your content in order to maximize your ad revenue? Has Google been a better partner when it comes to YouTube than it has when it comes to search?
- [33:04]
A
So basically YouTube used to put ads on our videos before we could, before we could even be part of the creator program. So that's where when we were eligible to do it, we were like, well, you know, they're going to show the ads anyway, so we might as well just try to make some money out of it, considering that whether we want to do it or not, YouTube is going to put ads on this. So I remember that for certain things, when a video is very long, we don't put ads on. We used to only have like, we had like a, I don't know, a video of 10 minutes and we're like, oh, okay, there's an ad break here and an outbreak at the end. But then over the last couple of months, I think they rolled out this new thing where they decide where the ads go. So at this point they basically decide we just upload the videos. What we have done is we have Patreon where we upload everything without that. So if there is people who want to like, we have subscribers who watch every video and it's mad because literally half of them are reviews of air purifiers. But they are actually into it. So they watch, you know, they watch everyone and then the video finishes and they say, oh, can you review this other one? You're like me. How do you even care so much? But they do and they are willing to support us on Patreon to get access to things sooner and also without the ads. So that's a good thing for us that now there is an opportunity. The fact that ads are show that their eyeballs then, then that means that if I say look, it's without ads, that's also a pro. It's like an opportunity. So in terms of the money that you make with ads, like, it's negligible. It's like we, we have videos with hundreds and thousands of views and we will still. If I look at how much money will be like $50, it's like just ridiculous really. So you can't re. I couldn't imagine. We had the opportunity. We did a collaboration video with Linus Tech Tips, which is a massive channel. And we had a conversation with our team and it's like ads is just nothing in terms of their revenue. That's not how they make their money. Because if they had to, then they couldn't have an entire team even making videos every day. You can still not make enough money to actually sustain a channel. And everything that comes like creating video content. Creating content in any way, shape or form. It's expensive, it's time consuming, it's high effort. It's ads alone. It doesn't cut it on YouTube.
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B
Yeah. All right. So Giselle, your most recent post was looking at how the shopping recommendations in Google's AI overviews are largely being trained, gained by marketing material and AI slop mainly sourced from Reddit. Do you think that there's like a better way, like you know, opportunity for like reputable publishers that who's, you know, like have like more trustworthy, like kind of product reviews to work with these like AI platforms in a way that's like, you know, reciprocal, that like, you know, the AI platforms are getting more reliable information and the publishers are actually being compensated for that content. And you know, what do you think that might look like?
- [36:36]
A
It's hard. I mean, I, I would like to believe there is, but it seems that based on how these platforms are growing, at the end of the day we, we become in their eyes the middleman that they cut out of the way. And just the fact that you know, even this information is being say that Google is actually using our information which is more trustworthy than just an AI spammed subreddit thread. They would still put their, the sponsored results to buy the product at the top. So it's like if we are monetizing through affiliate commissions, unless there is a way of monetization where as we discussed with engineers at the time when there is some sort of like creator program, like a reviewer program, a look, I'm creating this information and you are paying me for the information. Unless that happens and they see the value in information. And I feel like right now it doesn't sound like they're valuing information because they're not paying for it. And the big risk of this is that whilst the websites start dying, which has already started happening, the web is going to get stuck in 2023, which is when they fed the mass majority of these tools and then there's not going to be enough information about new things. And what we saw with the AI overviews is that it doesn't really matter because we were asking about products that don't exist and it was still giving us facts and stats of products that don't exist. I don't think they value that information and I would love it if they did. But the way they went about it shows that they don't. And this is not just Google, it's all of these platforms. The way they went about it means they don't value it. And I think it's been great to see some publishers get deals. I do worry that they probably cut themselves too short just to get A deal. And we are at this last cycle of whatever happens. And it's hard for me to see other than what perhaps Cloudflare is proposing. This idea of having some form of a toll of like, if you're going to come to my website, you're going to have to pay for it. But then that also creates a space where the sites that don't do that become free reign, get ravaged. And if they don't really value or assess that information in any way, then that opens up the space for, okay, well all the real websites are gated. Let's just create some fake spam, AI generated everything websites and then the tools are going to just go and feed from there. I mean, I'm really, I'm a bit pessimistic and a part of me feels like it's fine because it's going to be a couple of years and then people are going to start looking for human content again and they will be intentional about it. And anybody who survived is going to be able to grow from there. And I hope publishers survive. And I hope. I felt when we wrote that first article, it's not great to say, look, this legacy magazine, it's feeding off the bottom of the barrel right now, even though they have done some of the best journalism in the last, whatever, 20 years, it's hard to see that it's not, it's not good to see that. And I feel a lot of the arguments we had where, well, you know, all these poor journalists, you know, they are getting, they are going to get fired. And it's like, well, these are completely separate operations, like the journalists are going to get fired. Yes, and that's terrible. And they are destroying journalism in a way, the way that they're going about things. But the operations to create these review content and whatever, they are usually run by separate companies. They sell entire sections of the websites, like completely different operation. And I think that is what that type of operation and that my, that way of thinking about people on the web and that way of thinking about content, that's what's ruling the web right now. Those people, the people that just see, you know, a profit maximizing exercise in everything that they, they do and then paying for a creator, that's a waste of potential profit. Like, oh, but if, you know, it's subjective, if that content is them, is theirs or not, they put it on the web. It's everybody's. So I think we are still in that argument, which shows me that they don't care because obviously everybody, the fact that I get people who email me from every place in the world to tell me, I can't believe this is happening. What can I do about it? People actually care. The people that don't care are the people who can do something about it. And that's what makes it so, you know, hard to get through. But I honestly do believe that it will come a time where it doesn't matter if they cut the deals or not, because people are not going to be using those tools. Because no matter how many buttons they put on the apps that are just there where you can press the thumb, that they were not meant to be there, but now it's right there. Doesn't matter how much of that they do. People are not going to press a button and people are going to scroll past it and people are going to actually go on YouTube and find the person and they will keep. We have been all jumping through hoops over the last five years to find information. People are going to keep jumping through hoops. And I feel like there is a future for content creators, there is a future for publishers. What we are seeing with the smaller big sites or smaller sites coming from big sites. So for example, 404 Media motherboard gets close. 404 Media is born and it becomes a force to be reckoned with. And they do that all through the power of subscriptions. And that is empowering to see. And they are not apologetic and they will fight for what they think is right, which is a lot of what journalism is all about as well. So I feel like instead of being asking for pennies for the work that we have done in exchange of three visitors a day, we should just focus on educating people and connecting with people on a deeper level. Anybody who actually comes with a person, let's focus on them. Forget about the bots. The bots don't matter. Sitting at being sitting at those tables trying to cut those deals, they're going to try to undercut you. There has to be such power in numbers for anything to actually be meaningful. And they already told us they don't care about the value of our content. They don't value our content. But yeah, so sorry I don't have a more like, I don't know, positive like outlook for this.
- [43:41]
B
Yeah. But you know, one thing that I've kind of found encouraging is that, you know, to, to your point, like even like, you know, like younger audiences who are increasingly like kind of using these like AI overviews and these like kind of chat and chatbot interfaces, they still want those recommendations to Be, like, qualified by, like, an influencer or like, some kind of video, like, review that they can then, like, check it against. So there is still, like, you know, that maybe a little bit of that healthy skepticism out there that could maybe help turn the tide back in favor of, like, legit publishers. But I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see. And I'm sure that, you know, at House Fresh, you're gonna be documenting all of this and, you know, keeping everybody as updated as you possibly can about what you're seeing going on. So we appreciate you for that.
- [44:24]
A
So we just. We are in the UK and they just rolled out AI mode here. So I'm gonna be spending a lot of time with that and try to understand, you know, how does that work? Because supposedly it's different. So I want to spend time with that. I'm trying to spend time with Perplexity and chatgpt right now for. For research for another article. So, you know, I think that's all we can do. And that's where. Why we started writing and why we tell any publisher that gets in touch with us saying the same is happening to us is I tell your readers, tell them, tell them what's happening. They don't know, and they will know and they will start paying attention. And that's all. All you need to know is give them the word so that they put the name to what's happening. I think that's a great thing about, you know, when Corey Doctorow, he coined this term of identification and he gave us a word. So now when it happens, we can point it and tell it for what it is, and it allows you to understand and make a decision. So, you know, if any publisher is watching this, that they feel they've been struggling and they've been trying to make it work, but things are completely against you and you're seeing the same issues we have or even worse issues with other AI platforms or whatever. Just honestly just have an opinion piece and just share it and tell your readers because it will make a big difference. You will end up noticing there's lots of people who are willing to help you, who are willing to thank you, who are willing to share on Reddit, who are willing to drive, do everything they can for your website not to die. And that is all we can ask for right now. Really.
- [46:03]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well said. So, yeah, Giselle, thanks for this awesome conversation. This was great. And we'll be keeping an eye on House Fresh to kind of get a sense of how to go forward, I guess.
- [46:15]
A
Well, thank you so much for having me. And thank you for covering what we have been doing since the beginning. I think only now I talk to you, but you have been covering what we have been doing since the beginning. And actually, there was a time where traffic that we were getting from an exchanger was, you know, magic because we were getting no traffic. So it was incredible. So really appreciate it. I appreciate the reporting and, you know, creating space to have these conversations.
- [46:41]
B
Yeah. You know, we're glad to help. And, you know, like, like I said, really appreciate everything you're bringing to the table here. And a really awesome discussion that I'm sure our listeners and our viewers are going to get a lot out of. Thanks a bunch.
- [46:54]
A
Thank you.
- [46:55]
B
All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Till next time.
- [46:58]
A
Bye.