As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue
83 comments
·June 26, 2025dpacmittal
azemetre
Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.
blackoil
The choices given are to die today or die tomorrow, no wonder most are accepting whatever money they can get.
paul7986
AI is nothing without them if it becomes a zero sum business I guess AI tech companies are going to have to become publishers. That would be no good at all as democracy needs many varied voices!
csallen
Competition in the free market is not colonialism. The capitalistic marketplace is meant to involve disruption. That's the entire point: new companies come along and out-compete and out-innovate older companies and business models. The consumer wins. This is not the same as invading countries and subjugating the inhabitants, who have a human right to a peaceful life. No business in a capitalistic marketplace has a "right" to continue enjoying profits and resist innovation.
spacemadness
If this is the consumer winning I’d rather be losing. As far as I can tell, free market means let the monopolies control everything.
_DeadFred_
Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI)
Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)
Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)
Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)
Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)
Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)
Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)
Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)
Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)
Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.
Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.
Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
ujkhsjkdhf234
Capitalism and colonialism share a lot of similar traits and are not exclusive. In this case, this is the very definition of colonialism, taking over someone's territory and exploiting their resources. AI is trained on all of these publishers' material without consent and without compensation and then big tech turns around and says pay us if you want a slice of the pie we stole from you.
Ecstatify
What new companies? Google is a monopoly, along with most other major tech platforms. When a handful of corporations control entire market sectors and actively acquire or crush potential competitors, that's not free market competition, that's market consolidation that prevents the very disruption you're describing. The "creative destruction" of capitalism requires actual competition to exist, not just the theoretical possibility of it.
AstroBen
Yeah and then what happens in 2026 onwards? No one's going to put in the work to create high quality original content when they can't monetize it..
beej71
A few of us will. :) I give my stuff away for free with no ads. Maybe the web will get small again.
karaterobot
Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.
ceejayoz
> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users.
Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies.
Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...
"It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
csallen
I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated.
The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.
The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
rybosworld
In some sense I agree.
But I also think publishers have been complicit in providing a gradually worse experience, usually through SEO, for 10+ years.
This has drowned out what most people would call "good/original content" - think small, independent bloggers.
That big publishers might lose their shirts sounds like a good thing to me.
billllll
At the end of the day, they're subject to the same market forces. If the big publishers lose their shirts, that means small bloggers don't have any chance of making it big. The same market forces that make big publishers worse are going to squeeze smaller outfits and writers.
And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.
xixixao
It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).
ceejayoz
Ah, yes. Trickle-down economics again.
The trickle always turns out to be piss.
brokencode
Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?
slg
I downvoted because it is naive childlike logic that excuses current bad behavior on the possibility of future good behavior.
OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies?
If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations.
EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
ceejayoz
They should!
They won't.
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mattmanser
And then governments are mysteriously rolling over and saying of course it's not infringement and even if it is we'll legislate against it.
Just all stinks of corruption.
renegat0x0
Often it is hard for me to discover new places on internet using search. How monetization could take place if I cannot easily find for example Warhammer related blogs, resources.
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
citizenpaul
Google really is braindrained if the best thing they can come up with is to rebrand pop ups.
grugagag
Let’s not forget Google was sleeping on AI and it still is. They were ahead at some point but didnt know what to do with it.
joe_the_user
Yeah,
At this point, Google has become a shitty ChatGPT.
In the last few weeks, using both Google and ChatGPT for search, I get a far broader range of links from ChatGPT.
Basically, Google-today is the product of a long history of having and using its search the monopoly for profits and political agendas (include lots of other entities legally and otherwise forcing this use btw). All it's search results were as "opinionated" as an AI even before the appearance of ChatGPT. It's logical that any "green fields" search engine would be better.
Of course, the problem will be that OpenAI and company will face the
Example: The original Phil Specter version of Let It Be (the album) exists on Youtube but it's not possible to easily find it with either Google or Youtube searches (I've a number of times). But easily ChatGPT found a link to the song and album for me (Ole 'Chat gave strings use for google but these didn't work either btw).
seydor
They re going to have to do more than this. They can surely make an AI that determines which % of the LLM answer is owed to which website / source. Then either pay them ad revenue or demand the user to pay to see the rest of the answer. I don't often click on AI answers, and i assume most people don't. I find myself clicking beyond it only when the answer is bad.
If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
everforward
This doesn't feel like it will work to me, for a few reasons:
1. A video or survey will take longer than just finding the content elsewhere. The survey is also probably more effort.
2. This breaks the "flow". The odds that I get distracted or just lose interest before the ad/survey is done is pretty high.
3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is more "passing curiosity" than "thing I have a dedicated interest in". The effort and time I'm willing to put into access is low.
The real question for me is whether Offerwall is going to make it harder to get around the paywall than previously. There are a few sites that actually send the full article, they just cover it up with an HTML element. You can still see the full text if you open the request for the content in DevTools.
bargainbin
I can already see how this plays out, it falls flat, the increasing decline in search coincides with industry wide realisation LLMs still can’t achieve AGI, this sets alarm bells ringing, they offer a new system for advertisers to promote content via the AI responses since now “it’s just glorified search”
softwaredoug
AI kills search traffic. Yes.
OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
ceejayoz
Until they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.
heisenbit
And until now had to pay part of their revenue to Google for search results being ranked accordingly. Diversity of ingress vectors may not be such a bad thing.
GardenLetter27
And put ads and sponsored results in the LLMs.
candiddevmike
Using AI to do research almost seems worse than citing wikipedia as a reference.
Mars008
The question, did all traffic really go to AI companies? May be just there are so many jumping and blinking adds that users simply don't like it. Like youtube is unwatchable without add blockers or other add skipping tricks.
WD-42
Scare off whatever human visitors you have left with more paywalls, sounds like a great plan.
mrtksn
Readers can unlock more content(which is often just some AI slop or SEO optimized word salad) by watching an ad or can get their content on some AI chatbot on the VC's dime.
Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
deadbabe
The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections.
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
candiddevmike
No one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech.
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
righthand
Why would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.
etchalon
Hopefully everyone's learned not to build their business on top of any Google product. Who knows when they'll cancel it.
blackoil
Given the monopolies, what are the alternatives? For video content, Youtube is near monopoly with alternatives no better than Google. Same goes for mobile app, website (traffic via Google SE), offline store (search/reviews on maps)
etchalon
Maybe I should have qualified that with new Google Product.
Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.