Sign of the Internet Times – The End of Salon.com
I wasn’t expecting to read this today:
But the rationale for it shouldn’t have surprised me:
The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable.
This makes sense. I can’t speak for a news site like Salon, but I can tell you that AI is killing search; it’s killing views, and scrapers run up the traffic bill for most sites. My saving grace is being small enough that I don’t attract that many bots, and I take some action to block some of the worst, but for a large site like Salon, that’s a nightmarish amount of effort to make money in a dwindling advertising market.
Consider:
This is because Google’s crawlers are indexing a site for search and training its AI tools at the same time.
But this is the bigger risk for sites with data worth training an AI model on: answering prompts without anyone ever visiting the site. For example, this happened this summer:
What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all
But the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that:
- We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.
- Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription.
- The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots.
This isn’t good, but the easy use of agents to automatically look for cracks, grab data, etc., has created an avalanche of web traffic someone has to pay for and made every website vulnerable to hacking. I had to recover a WordPress site after a hack years ago. It took a ton of work. I probably wouldn’t do it again. I do this as a hobby, but even if I did it for a living, I’d have to weigh the cost of the work against the revenue the site could bring in.
Perhaps Salon is doing just that.
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