by Ian Betteridge

HouseFresh and the challenges of affiliate content

You might have noticed a post from HouseFresh doing the rounds, especially if you have anything to do with creating content intended to generate affiliate revenue. It’s caused quite a stir, particularly among publishers. 

My background is in product testing. My first job in publishing was in MacUser’s testing labs, where we would regularly have 10–20 products in and – literally in some cases – take them apart to decide which one was best. Next door was the PC Pro labs, which did the same thing, on an even bigger scale. On a visit to New York a few years later, I went to the testing labs of a US publisher: even bigger, with people who looked like they should be wearing lab coats picking over the bones of machines. The product testers were real experts, often devising unique tests designed to stretch the products in ways which matched up the real-world pounding they would take. 

But those were proper group tests. What HouseFresh is writing about is not those. Their focus is the “best” article, written specifically to deliver affiliate clicks and sales, and designed to hit a specific keyword. 

The HouseFresh article rips the lid off some of the worst aspects of content written to deliver sales though affiliate links (I refuse point-blank to call it “comtent”, which has to be one of the worst words ever invented). Their biggest complaint is that a lot of the pages you will see which rank highly on Google for affiliate-led keywords are written by people who have never had the products in their hands, let alone tested them. They may have done desk research, which involves, at best, scouring spec sheets for hidden details and, at worst, just scouring the user reviews on Amazon. But that doesn’t tell you all that much about a product and whether it’s any good or not.

Of course, this is really Google’s fault because it is rewarding low-quality content by ranking it highly. This content, which is far cheaper to produce than a real group test, can be churned out quickly. A quick writer can do one or two a day, while a group test might take two weeks to organise, test and write. Use an LLM and you can probably make that process even faster. Just make sure to write your prompt to make it include phrases like our lab tests and our experts said to satisfy Google’s pretty surface-deep view of how content based on real-world experience works.

HouseFresh’s hope is that Google will improve its algorithms and start rewarding content which is of higher quality, but I have my doubts. I suspect that the company’s focus is on creating “answers engines”like Gemini, rather than the traditional ten blue links. And even if it can improve its algorithms to prioritise in-depth reviews, gaming the SEO system will often look like a better option to many of the kind of publishers HouseFresh is attacking: the ones who have bought well-known brands but now use them to churn out lower quality content. 

There are, and will be, exceptions, mostly from publishers who have a heritage in creating brands, rather than the ones that buy brands just for their heritage. But the sheer volume of content created by others could drown them out—especially as LLMs make it easier to generate entire sites within days.

As I have pointed out, I believe businesses based on this kind of affiliate-led content will also be disrupted over the coming few years by conversational AI. Once people have the option of having a conversation with a smart recommendation engine to tailor buying advice to exactly their needs, “best XXX” articles based on desk research or mining Amazon reviews just won’t be good enough. 

Google is a choke point for the affiliate content business, but it’s not the only one. The second is Amazon, where most publishers derive a large chunk of their affiliate revenue. Although reliable numbers are difficult to find, Datanyze estimates Amazon has around 48% of the market share in affiliate networks, and anecdotally, I suspect the amount of revenue that brings in for publishers is higher still. Every publisher I know has sought to reduce their exposure to Amazon, especially after the effective demise of its Onsite Associates programme (known internally as OSP), changes in policy from Amazon would have a massive effect on publishers. But the reality is that if Amazon turned off the taps, or even reduced them, publishers with big investments in affiliate content production would be in trouble. 

Would Amazon do this? It depends if you believe that Cory Doctorow’s enshittification cycle applies to it: 

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Are we at the point where Amazon starts to claw back the revenue it shares with its “business customers” – affiliate partners? Currently, probably not. But it’s worth thinking about the longer term, too. Already, 61% of US shoppers begin their buying journey on Amazon regularly. That’s traffic which Amazon has to pay no extra commission on, and so it’s something that it would love to do more of. 

Plus, of course, Amazon has hundreds of millions of reviews of its own that it could tap to automatically create recommendations for users, including by layering conversational AI on top of it to allow users to get “intelligent” recommendations. The potential is there for Amazon to be a trusted source of reviews, as well as the retailer of choice for online.

The “good” news is that presently, Amazon is struggling with its own grey goo of content in the form of fake reviews generated by AI. It’s responded with more AI to try to trim them out. But the key question is really what happens at the point it decides that the money it spends on delivering affiliate revenue would be better off spent on ads, or on-site AI, or whatever else.

Ironically, the kind of content mills which HouseFresh is railing against would be less bothered if Amazon does ever scale back on its focus on affiliates: they are, most likely, pretty aware that the brands they are using are near the end of their life, and if the affiliate cash cow moves on the private equity companies will have long since made a sizeable return. 

The relationship between Amazon and publishers, like that of Google and publishers, is some kind of symbiosis. Amazon gains revenue from the clicks that publishers drive their way. Publishers get a slice of that money, enough for them to survive and grow. But the key question is whether that symbiosis is obligate – where each depends on the other for survival – or facultative, where each benefits but could survive alone. If it’s the former, affiliate content has a long and profitable future. If it’s the latter, then eventually, publishers who go all-in on it may have a problem. 

by Ian Betteridge

Weeknote, Sunday 19th February 2024

The good thing about not writing a weeknote for a week is you have plenty of things to write about. The bad thing is that you have plenty of things to write about.

We’ve managed to fit in two movies in the past fortnight: All of us strangers, and The zone of interest. What a pair of absolute crackers. Go and see them in the cinema, don’t wait till you can stream them or whatever. But then I would say that because I love the cinema, something I have only recently rediscovered.

On a trip to that there London, we managed to squeeze in both exhibitions on at the Courtauld – Cute, and Frank Auerbach – as well as a wander around the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery. Cute was a little disappointing: lots of great objects, but the curation didn’t really tell a story that had any narrative to it. It was more “here’s a thing, here’s a thing, oh and another set of things”. Auerbach is a brilliant artists, but not totally my cup of tea – but he is Kim’s, so that’s fine.

The NPG was a place that I was very familiar with. When I worked at Redwood, we were just across the road in a building which is now a hotel, so I often dropped into the NPG at lunch time for a sit and think. The renovation is a huge improvement, not simply for the fabric of the building but also for the way it’s curated. The Victorians, which used to be a gallery of Dead White Men(TM) now actually tells a story of colonialism and empire through almost exactly the same pictures. Also: whoever decided to put Radclyffe Hall in between Churchill and George VI is a genius.

We also headed over to Oxford for an overnight trip, seeing our lovely friends and their lovely children and also William Kentridge doing the fifth of the Slade Lectures Hilary 2024. I wish we had been able to go to the whole series – Kentridge is a brilliant lecturer as well as an artist I greatly admire. Seeing things like that makes me wish I lived in an academic city, instead of in a city which just happens to have two universities bolted on to it. There is a profound difference, and it’s one of the things that I most dislike about Canterbury.

At the Ashmolean, we saw Colour Revolution, which will have closed when you read this. I liked it: in particular I liked the bust of Maharajah Duleep Singh, heir to the Punjab who was forced into exile in England when we stole his land. The bust on display has his actual skin tone. Queen Victoria insisted on a classic, plain white version for herself. If that isn’t a nod to how Indians – even noble ones – were seen by the Victorians, I don’t know what is.

While there, we also caught Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother at Modern Art Oxford. I was not impressed. There is something about the retreat into mysticism which radical politics of the 60s and 70s succumbed to which irritates the heck out of me. It’s particularly true for second-wave feminism: as Michael Moorcock said in The Retreat from Liberty, “being Mother of the Universe cannot offer much consolation while Father is always in evidence somewhere, even if he spends most evenings at the pub.”

Coincidentally, Moorcock was also critical of the Greenham protests, which he saw as faux radical with zero chance of actually changing anything, and with little/no consequences if you got arrested. It’s not popular to say so now, but he was right – Greenham changed nothing, and the energy which went into it would have been far better spent campaigning, say, for the police to take rape seriously (which they very much didn’t at the time).

This week I have been reading…

Having finished the 500+ page Babel I dived into the 500+ page The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock, and finished it. It’s the closest thing Moorcock is likely to write to an autobiography, but of course includes huge strands of fiction in it. Weirdly, he includes many real names of people, but disguises others — perhaps to make it clear that this is a fictional “real” Moorcock too (it’s not down to actually needing the disguise people for legal or other reasons — changing Ballard to Allard isn’t going to fool anyone, and with JGB dead there’s no issue of libel anyway).

I also finished Zoe Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, which is the story of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. If you haven’t been obsessively following it this book is an excellent romp through all that’s happened. But if you have, there’s probably not a lot in here which will either surprise you or that you won’t be aware of.

Musk is, of course, the main character. But until the day when he tells his own story, he’s a main character that is almost entirely absent. That allows the reader to paint in whatever their own feelings are about him, but it doesn’t really answer the question of why he is like this, why he takes these dreadful decisions. Nor does it really tell us mush about how he manages to get away with it, although having more money than is right for any human being is probably part of the answer.

The Emperor’s New Clothes definitely applies to those around him, and one of the more interesting parts is the accounts of those who attempted to play along with the Musk regime at Twitter, mollifying him and trying to find ways to do what he wanted without destroying their own values in the process. There will no doubt be a few more of those stories come out over the next few years, and I hope there is ultimately a revised version which tells those too.

This week I have been writing…

Last week’s Ten Blue Links was really a collection of bad things that are happening in tech at the moment. It really is quite grim: between Apple deciding it’s more likely to achieve growth through rentier capitalism than making high-quality products that ordinary people can afford, VCs turning out to be utter morons, and Sam Altman being, well, what we all know he is (but aren’t really saying) I don’t think there has been a more depressing landscape in the tech industry.

As I said at the end of that piece, it’s best to sup with a long spoon.

Meanwhile I made some progress on Orford. Not as much as I would have liked, but I solved a knotty problem in the plot by bringing the introduction of a character to much earlier in the work.

by Ian Betteridge

Michael Tsai – iOS 17.4 Changes PWAs to Shortcuts in EU

Michael Tsai – Blog – iOS 17.4 Changes PWAs to Shortcuts in EU:

Apple had two years or so to prepare for the DMA, but they “had to” to remove the feature entirely (and throw away user data) rather than give the third-party API parity with what Safari can do. I find the privacy argument totally unconvincing because the alternative they chose is to put all the sites in the same browser. If you’re concerned about buggy data isolation or permissions, isn’t this even worse?

Michael neatly collects together the responses to Apple’s frankly pathetic removal of proper PWA support in the EU, but I think his own quote above hits the nail on the head. The company has had years to prepare for this. If it got blindsided, that’s a management failure. If it’s being petulant, that’s a management failure. If it can’t devote the resources to make this work, that’s a management failure. And if this is an attempt to enforce using native APIs and the App Store rather than PWAs… well, that too is a management failure. 

Apple’s whole response to the DMA ruling has been nothing but disastrous for its credibility amongst developers, but unfortunately the company seems to have forgotten that without developers, its platforms are nothing but pretty user interfaces for copying files around. 

by Ian Betteridge

Daring Fireball: The European Commission Had Nothing to Do With Apple’s Reversal on Supporting RCS

Daring Fireball: The European Commission Had Nothing to Do With Apple’s Reversal on Supporting RCS:

China, unlike the EU, seemingly knows how to draft effective regulations to achieve specific goals.

China, unlike the EU, is a repressive regime with a chokehold over Apple’s business. I don’t think Apple caving in to it has much to do with the quality of how China drafts its laws.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links, 12 Feb 2024: the work from home edit

I like links. You like links. Everyone likes links!

1. The dirty fight of “return to office”

I’ve written before that if you can’t lead teams remotely, that’s your problem, not your team’s. Of course, getting some face-to-face time is useful and valuable, but mandating a set number of days per week isn’t actually that useful. What’s interesting is that the evidence suggests there’s no basis to the idea of increased productivity in the office. So what is causing the race to bring people in?

2. The AI data centre boom must be stopped

The amount of energy required by AI is absolutely eye watering, and it’s fuelling (sic) what might turn into an energy crisis.

3. The story of Mitchell Cole

I hadn’t heard of Mitchell Cole before, but I’m glad I read this. Cole was a 27-year-old footballer who was forced to quit the game owing to a heart condition, and died while having a kickabout with his mates.

4. Betteridge’s Law strikes again

No, they’re not.

5. Apple confirms no more web apps for naughty Europeans

Last week I mentioned I wasn’t going to assume malice by Apple breaking web apps on iOS in a new beta. This week, they have confirmed that’s precisely what it is. When Apple says it can’t “securely” provide both web app support and alternate rendering engines, it’s using the meaning of “securely” which refers to securing their income streams, not actual computer security. Pathetic stuff from Cupertino.

6. The iMessage Halo Effect

I think John Siracusa is exactly right: it’s the iPhone which gives iMessage its cachet, not the other way around. It’s not too late for the company to develop iMessage for other platforms.

7. AI companies lose value after Microsoft and Google quarterly earnings

Losing $190bn in stock market value seems a little careless to me. But the point really is that we are right at the start of learning to use LLMs in creative ways. Replacing cheap copywriters is not where the real action is, but currently that’s all everyone is fixating on.

8. Citizen Musk

We all know that Elon is an idiot, but this article shows just how much he’s been drawn into a universe of misinformation (or, as we used to call them, “lies”). I’m not sure if he’s stupid or venal, or both. Probably both.

9. How the government captured the BBC

Alan Rusbridger pointing out how the BBC editorial standards committee now has just member who is both uninvolved in daily decision-making and has a background in news, and that’s Robbie Gibb, who also happens to be Theresa May’s former director of communications. The BBC isn’t alone in this (Reach plc has no one on its board with any newspaper/online journalism experience), but it’s remarkable how much the Tories have worked to subvert the public service bodies of this country.

10. Amazon to customers: have a worse service, and we’re putting up the price

Amazon has been doing enshittification since before it was fashionable, but this is definitely their boldest move yet.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links, “Tech is Bad Right Now” Edition

I remain a technology optimist, but weeks like this give even me an “are we the baddies” moment or two. On to the links.

1. Sam wants more more money

Sam Altman wants $7 trillion. Not to transition the planet to a carbon-free economy, end poverty, or provide universal healthcare to every person on the planet — all of which could be done with that kind of money — but to build AI chips. When I mentioned this on Threads, some dude popped up to helpful educate me that AI would enable us to do all those things. Mate, we don’t need AI for any of that. We just need to end capitalism.

2. Apple broke web apps

I’m not going to rush in and say that breaking support for progressive web apps — one of the few ways to distribute apps on the iPhone without giving Apple its tithe — was deliberate. While I’m not inclined to assume malice about bugs in beta software, I would very definitely assume malice if this made it into the release version.

3. Remember when VCs were supposed to be smart?

The savaging that Chris Dixon’s silly little book defending crypto has taken is entirely justified. Pushing said book on to the New York Times “bestseller” list by bulk ordering, when you know that bulk ordering gets publicly noted, shows either the kind of “I don’t care you’re not the boss of me” attitude of a 14-year-old boy, or just stupidity. Fair play to Penguin Random House, though: they must have known that whatever they paid Dixon for this laugh-a-minute publication would be easily recouped by copies bought for his worshippers at the firms his company has thrown money into.

4. Enshittification, FT-style

I was literally about to mail Cory saying “ha ha you got the attention of the FT” when I spotted he’d actually written the piece himself. As he rightly says, we are in the enshittocene.

5. My printer hates me

It’s taken a while, but it looks like mainstream publications — OK, The Atlantic — are taking note that just because you buy a product doesn’t mean you own it. Printers are just one example, and not even the most egregious. Every large corporate has spotted that charging rents is easier than making good products and competing in a free(ish) market. The surprising thing, to me, is how many people think this is a good idea for ordinary people.

6. App stores keep us safe, Redux

I’ve spent far too much time over the past couple of weeks arguing with people who believe that Apple is entirely correct to face off against the big bad tech-hating European Union about app stores. Without Daddy Apple keeping us all safe, someone might download a malicious app! The problem is, of course, is that app stores don’t really keep you safe, something we saw again this week. What they do is make you believe that it’s someone else’s responsibility to keep you safe, lulling you into a false sense of security. Oh, and of course, they keep developers paying rent to platform owners.

7. You will be wanting to buy this book

Kara Swisher has written a book. You want to buy this book because if it’s anything like the extract, it’s going to be a doozy. And in the spirit of this article, you should pre-order it from Bookshop.org rather than Amazon.

8. Comic Sans is a good font

Yes. It is. I will not be taking questions at this time.

9. British Universities are a mess

Gaby Hinsliff’s article on the problems of UK universities is well worth a read, but I don’t entirely agree with it. I have heard too many horror stories from academics who have been “encouraged” to ensure that foreign students (who pay a lot of money) pass courses. Like much of the Tory legacy that Labour will inherit, it will take decades to undo the horrific damage this government has done to higher education. The entire system of funding both institutions and students needs dismantling and rebuilding.

10. Sup with a long spoon

Reach has reached (ahem) a deal with Amazon to give away its crown jewels to make a few pecks of corn. I had thought that publishers might have learned that collaborating with big tech platforms never means they get a good deal, but here we are. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me ten times, I’m probably a publisher.

by Ian Betteridge

Weeknote, Sunday 4th February 2024

Quite a busy week, all told. I finished off a feature for PC Pro magazine, which will be the first freelance bit of tech journalism I’ve done for quite some time (I think it’s a good five years since the last one). I also took a trip into London to see one of my former colleagues, and it was great to hear what they have been up to. That includes a project I had encouraged them to do involving offering more work experience placements for young people wanting to get into automotive journalism, and it sounds like it’s been a success.

I’m excellent at encouraging other people. Encouraging myself is a bit harder. But even that’s been pretty good this week. I’m still arsing around with technology too much, and thinking too much (and too hard) about platforms and systems and all that jazz. But I also feel like I’m getting somewhere – finally – with the personal projects I have wanted to work on.

One thing I have been arsing around with (for professional purposes) is AI image generation, and it’s absolutely hilarious. Can you guess what the prompt was which produced the image at the top?

Things I have been reading

I’ve been reading Babel by R F Huang this week, and I’m entranced. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in it – I will probably have to write a post just about it when I’m finished – but there are two things which hit hard for me: the scene at the start, where Robin is leaving Canton and believes that he will never see it again, and the continual careful subtext of the seduction by empire of its best and brightest subjects. For me – a grandchild of the Empire, whose mother left Imperial India as a small child – there are so many elements where both those points hit hard. It’s a terrific book, and if you haven’t read it, you really should.

Things I have been writing

I wrote something about Apple Vision Pro, in bullet point form. The confounding thing about Apple is that I think they have, to a degree, lost their soul, and in some ways the Vision Pro is emblematic of that. Vision Pro feels like a device that’s not going to encourage people to be more creative – except in the context of creating things for others to view on Vision Pro.

I’ve been meaning to do a regular link blog post for a while, and now I have an idea for it. So every Friday, I’m going to do a ten blue links post with ten things that have found their way into my inbox. I don’t think the format of the first one is quite right because it is too long (and took too long to write), but I’ll see how it develops. I’m pondering how to make this an email too.

Speaking of newsletters, this week’s was about adapting to the new reality of search. Quality content is going to win, ultimately. Includes a passing reference to Roland Barthes. What do you expect from a philosophy graduate?

I’ve also been working on Orford, the piece of fiction which may well be a novel. I have the beginning. Not only that, but I have the end. How I get from one to the other is the tricky bit. I think I need to redo the outline because that bit just isn’t hanging together well. And then I need to write about another 50,000 words. Go me.

by Ian Betteridge

Some thoughts on Apple Vision Pro (and VR/AR in general)

  • As many people have noted, the ultimate platform for augmented reality is something that is both portable (can be worn all the time) and invisible (not a huge set of goggles which get in the way of your interactions with the world. We are so far away from this in terms of technology that I would be surprised if we even have it in my lifetime (see also: fully autonomous vehicles that you can drive in).
  • The price of Apple Vision is not unreasonable given the technology in it. They are not selling this at a loss, and I would expect the margins on it are similar to other Apple products, but Apple Vision is not something that can currently be made at under $1000, which is probably the sweet spot for this kind of tech.
  • As with the Apple Watch, the company has a set of use cases in mind. As with the Apple Watch, these will almost certainly not be the uses that customers actually find most compelling. Expect the marketing to shift in response to what actually resonates with people.
  • This represents a minor potential issue for Apple. Apple Watch was priced low enough to have quite a wide spread of customers, especially once the cheaper hardware options appeared after a year or two. Apple Vision is priced too high to get a wide range of customer types. The danger is that it will skew too heavily towards highly-affluent customers, and they kinds of uses they make of devices, for Apple to get much insight into what the real uses of Apple Vision are. Apple doesn’t do much testing with real users (even under NDA) before products are released. That means real-world feedback is vital.
  • The criticisms that people have made about the battery life are really not that relevant. No one is going to use this wandering around. You’re going to mostly have your behind in a chair. I’ve done a lot of VR demos when moving and nothing breaks the “reality” of the app you’re using than trying to do much in the physical world. Yes, the passthrough video means you can do this. But trust me, you won’t.
  • It’s a shame that you can’t have multiple Mac “monitors” open at the same time. But you can have multiple apps, so I would guess quite a few of the things you want to keep open on multiple monitors will devolve to native apps.
  • It’s a bigger shame Apple has chosen to only have an App Store model for software. The lack of hackability of the platform won’t matter to most people, but it does matter to me. This isn’t a market of customers who need the same level of “protection” as on a smartphone, so the justification that all apps need to be checked for malware doesn’t exist on this platform. This was a chance for Apple to break with the past. It’s chosen not to do so.
  • I wonder if, strategically, Apple has ended up “skating to where the puck was” rather than where it’s going to be. It’s taken so long to get Apple Vision out – by some reports, perhaps ten years – that the interest in and relevance of VR and AR has died down. VR’s use cases have mostly boiled down to games. AR is still not really a possibility, at least not in its ultimate form.
by Ian Betteridge

Ten blue links for 3rd Feb, 2024

I mentioned a while ago on Mastodon that I had such a backlog of stuff I had saved to read and could potentially write about that I was going to have to steal Cory’s approach and do a weekly linkblog post. That idea got put on the back burner for a couple of weeks as I had both a feature (forthcoming for PC Pro magazine) and a short training session (end of February, details to follow once its advertised).

And of course, I needed a concept — what we call in journalism a franchise. Putting in the work of creating something weekly is a lot easier if you can force it into some kind of theme. But I have been scratching my head trying to think of something.

Of course, as soon as you think of something it’s obvious: hence Ten Blue Links. Like the old-school Google we knew and loved (and was useful) I’m going to create a page every Saturday which just lists ten things which have amused/entertained/informed me, and that I think are worth your time reading. There’s no topic theme — I read a lot, so that wouldn’t make sense — although every now and then if something big has happened I might make one.

Some words about my tools and process

I’m far too online, and I hop about between tools far too often. But there are two online services which have stuck with me for quite a while now: Raindrop, and Readwise Reader.

Raindrop is a bookmarking service, like Pinboard but a lot better. I use it to dump in links which I know will be useful to me in the future, but which aren’t in-depth reading. How-to’s, tips, that kind of thing, all of which I categorise and tag so they form even more useful collections.

Readwise Reader, on the other hand, is a read-it-later service like Pocket — but it’s the Olympic Gold medal winning version, the Pele and Maradonna and Messi combined into one of reading things. It’s perfectly happy ingesting feeds, or emails, or PDFs as well as simple saving articles, and it integrates with Readwise (of course) which I use to funnel all kinds of stuff into my Obsidian notes. It costs money, but it’s a service that is well worth it. I would imagine that most of what I write about in Ten Blue Links is going to come from Readwise.

This one has ended up long, but I promise I’ll make it shorter next time…

The ten blue links for this week

1. Apple’s culture shaped its DMA response

I wrote at length about my feelings over Apple’s response to the EU DMA — childish is the kindest way of putting it — but I really enjoyed Manton Reece’s short post about it. Manton’s focus is Apple’s culture, how that has been shaped, and how that has really influenced their response:

Because of their decades of truly great products, Apple thinks they are more clever than anyone else. Because of their focus on privacy, Apple thinks they are righteous. Because of their financial success, Apple thinks they are more powerful than governments. The DMA will test whether they’re right.

2. Return to office = failure of management

Apple, of course, is one of the companies that has mandated its workers return to office — and they are not alone. But some new research has found that not only does RTO not improve productivity, and damages worker engagement, it actually stems from a simple need for control from managers. Simply put: bad leadership:

“Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad performance”.

3. Everyone is a sellout now

The creative industries are having a bad decade. Journalism, in particular, is in a horrible place with jobs lost left, right and centre. Rebecca Jennings wrote a great article about how everyone now has to be a pitch person, and how basically if, for example, you’re a writer you’re now expected to also be able to market your work — and won’t get employment if you don’t. And of course, this has a direct, and negative, impact on your actual work:

Next thing you know, it’s been three years and you’ve spent almost no time on your art,” he tells me. “You’re getting worse at it, but you’re becoming a great marketer for a product which is less and less good.”

4. Fertile fallacies

Sam Freedman’s article on fertile fallacies and policy bubbles was specifically about politics, but I think it’s equally applicable to many areas of life. Sam’s point is that sometimes bad ideas work at first, up until the point where they don’t. This is because they often have a kernel of truth about them, or are a reaction to something which has pushed too far.

A policy belief that initially began with an important truth – governments need to have control over state spending and some process to maintain it – has ended up distorted into an absurd farce whereby Treasury officials are frantically changing their policy proposals for the Chancellor based on daily fluctuations in projected borrowing for 2029.

But you can apply this idea everywhere. Consider tech: app stores were a reaction to the absolute hell that was mobile apps in the pre-iPhone era, coupled to the opportunity to make something that was a little more secure for users than the PC. This has inflated to the point where you’ll find people who genuinely believe that no one should have the right to install software on a device they own, and that developers owe a tithe to whoever made the platform they’re using.

5. The evolution of the Conservative mind

There is a connection here, I think, with Simon Wren-Lewis’ piece on the evolution of the British Conservative party from neoliberalism as economic doctrine to social conservatism which solely acts in the interests of the wealthy. As with the policy fallacies that Freedman focuses on, the central doctrinal fallacy of neoliberalism has inflated into a bubble that goes well beyond its original intent.

In the UK, the inflationary force in this bubble was Brexit:

The key moment in this transformation in the UK was of course Brexit. Although it is just about possible to rationalise Brexit in neoliberal terms, if we think about power, Brexit was far from neoliberal. The overwhelming majority of businesses and corporations selling to and from the UK suffered serious damage at the hands of newspaper owners and a few very wealthy individuals. This kind of capture of a neoliberal party by monied interests is not really surprising, because once a politician sees themselves as representing the interests of corporations and businesses generally rather than society, it is a small step to start representing the interests of particular and potentially unrepresentative corporations and businesses (and their ‘think tanks’), especially if those businesses happen to be newspapers or party donors or future employers. Corruption inevitably follows.

Of course, this doesn’t explain the similar process that has happened in the US and across the world, but there were, no doubt, similar processes at work.

6. AI Agents are the future of computing

One piece that I have read and reread a few times now is Bill Gates’ article on how AI agents are the future of computing. I wrote about this a while ago, too, focusing on Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept. Conversational interfaces change everything, and Gates thinks it effectively means the end of applications as we know them:

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

I think Bill is right, and he also raises a lot of challenges — mainly, that to do this stuff properly requires a lot of your personal information to be known by the agent, and managing that in a way which preserves privacy is going to be a tough thing to do.

7. A long interview with Satya Nadella

Another article that I have been rereading is the interview by Axel Spring CEO Mathias Döpfner with Satya Nadella. I find Nadella fascinating: equal parts MBA-bland and tough as old boots, and someone who has done that rarest of things: taken an established business and remade it. While the DNA of the old Microsoft is still there, he’s turned the company into something quite different.

There’s a tonne of interesting stuff in there — Obsidian tells me I have nearly 1500 words of quotes saved from it — covering AI, China, and leadership. But I found this quote pretty interesting, on the relationship between AI and publishers:

After all, with synthetic data training, I think that the incentive is that we create more synthetic data. And if you’re training on synthetic data, where you don’t have stable attribution to likeness, that becomes a hard thing. So, there is some technological disruption we will have to be mindful of. The fact is, that no publisher will allow you to crawl their content if there isn’t a value exchange, and the value exchange has to come in two forms. One is traffic, and the other is revenue share.

8. Technology as rent-seeking process

This article by Wendy Liu from 2019 — which feels a lot longer ago than just five years — looks at the business models of technology service companies as effectively being tax collection, and boy she was right. Every company you can think of now, from Apple to Meta to Google and beyond, seems to be hitching its “growth” wagon to collecting tithes of one sort or another. It’s no longer enough to simply make products and sell them: you have have have ongoing revenue from users to grow.1

What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service – be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff – then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity.

9. Elon Musk continues lying

Joan Westenberg — who you must read every time — notes that Elon Musk is, of course, a liar and yet gets a free pass on his lies every single time from credulous journalists. This time it’s Neuralink, and its claim to have implanted some kind of brain chip into a human:

Despite providing no evidence of this milestone, and without any 3rd party verification, the claim was quickly republished by major news outlets without scrutiny or confirmation. Journalists (or, more charitably, their editors) have once again eagerly provided publicity to Musk in the pursuit of advertising traffic to their sites, failing in their basic journalistic responsibility to fact-check. To question. To scrutinise. To ask for the truth.

And journalists wonder why journalism is in trouble.

10. More universal public services, please

Jason Hickel is someone you should be reading, generally, and I could have linked to any one of about 10 articles of his I’ve read recently. But one place to start is his essay on how universal public services help to eliminate the artificial scarcity that capitalism — and particularly rent seekers — profit most from:

By universal services here I mean not only healthcare and education, but also housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications. In other words, a decommodification of the core social sector — the means of everyday survival. And I mean attractive, high-quality, democratically managed, properly universal services, not the purposefully shitty last-resort systems we see in the US and other neoliberal countries. What does this look like? How do we get there?

I would add a few technology platforms to this list too… but that’s another story.

  1. I’ve always hated calling people users rather than customers. You owe “users” nothing. You owe your customers everything. ↩︎
by Ian Betteridge

Adapting to the new reality of search

It’s obvious at this point that the landscape of search traffic for publishers is rapidly changing, and not generally for the better. Every SEO I know is complaining about the same patterns: Google results getting swamped by low-quality content; the rise of quick fire-and-forget AI-generated SEO farms, which can impact heavily on short-term traffic in any topic area; and user-generated content being overvalued by Google.

Or, to summarise it: quality content is not, currently, winning the battle for attention.

And then of course there is Google and others’ experiments with putting more answers to search queries on the results page. I’m on record as believing that a lot of traffic, especially for pages designed to answer specific queries, is going to go away as AI gets better at answering questions. Even for affiliate content, I think the appeal of answers that you can have a conversation with, so you get a completely custom answer to, say, what laptop to buy, will be so high for consumers that publishers will see declines in traffic over the coming years. 

So then, publishers are facing a few years of transition from old models – where it was possible to get a lot of traffic from terms like “when is the Super Bowl” or “how much is a Ford Fiesta?” — to a future where every single question like that can be answered on the page. 

Knowing this, there is no point in setting a strategy for the coming year which doesn’t take account of this longer-term trend. But how can you do that, while also not losing large chunks of visits?

SEO strategies for the next year

The starting point is to look at keyword intent and analyse how likely it is that there is a long-term future for traffic. I follow a fairly standard intent-based split into four buckets:

  • Informational: Getting specific answers, usually starting with how/why/whats and commonly answered with some kinds of tutorial
  • Commercial: Usually showing some kind of purchase intent, at either early or late stages in the funnel. Almost always including bests, comparisons, reviews, product categories or product/service names. Best answered by reviews and comparisons, and, of course, the heart of affiliate revenue.
  • Transactional: All about completing the immediate action of purchase. Usually involves keywords like “buy”, “cheap”, “quote” and sometimes also location-based, such as “buy cheap tires in Canterbury”. 
  • Navigational: Site and brand names, typically typed in because you want to find a specific brand/product site. 

As SEMrush noted last year, transactional and commercial keywords are on the rise, while informational and navigational are declining. That’s good news if you’re looking to affiliate content to drive your revenue over the next year or so, but it also means that informational queries are both dropping in volume and will be answered more on the page through AI-driven features like Search Generative Experience (SGE). 

For entertainment brands that have come to rely on informational content about, say, Love Island and have no authority at all about products, this could lead to a particularly bad short-term squeeze. 

The temptation will be to try to turn entertainment brands into product focused ones, but it’s worth not going overboard with this, as over the long term it could dilute authority in other areas. To put it another way, if it doesn’t fit, don’t force it: no one really wants reviews of Love Island false eyelashes (sorry, Liverpool Echo).

Where you should be focusing across the board, though, is on quality, particularly in three areas:

  • Originality
  • Authorship
  • Experience

For a long time, one of the dirty secrets of SEO work was the amount of time you could spend trying to steal traffic from your competition by creating “me too but better” content. Check out what keywords they were ranking for, and if you didn’t have equivalents, create them and go on an updating binge to get them to rank. This had the double whammy of both getting you traffic, and weakening your competition.

I told you it was dirty, didn’t I?

The problem with this was that combined with headings targeting related keywords, everyone ended up with content which was highly optimised but unoriginal. It all looked, and often read, the same. It’s no wonder that this is the kind of approach which has worked for using AI to generate quick sites for profit: any content approach which can be reduced to a mechanical process will ultimately be able to be done by an LLM. 

Unleash the quirk-en

To stand out, you are going to have to engage some originality in your approaches. That doesn’t mean abandoning the basics of on-page SEO, or never looking at your rivals for ideas. But it means that if your rival is taking an approach, thinking of an original way to answer the same need for the audience will help you stand out. And in a world of AI-generated grey goo content, you will need to stand out. 

How do you do that? Well, that is a creative question for you to answer – and you do still have some creative journalists left in the building, right? My personal favourite is The Verge’s magnificent pastiche of an affiliate article, but your mileage may vary – and more importantly, the things which make your audience laugh, cry, and so on are areas that only your experts can tell you.

Why Roland Barthes would have been a terrible SEO

The second area is our old friend authorship because far from being dead, the author is back at the centre of the universe. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you will already have good quality author pages which link to every single article from your author. You will also have purged your sites of those dreadful “Brand Byline” things which indicate either a confused content strategy or content with quality so low that no one wants to put their name on it. 

Now it’s time to go deeper, and that will mean using any means necessary to establish the authority of authors. Make sure that your authors are “out there” – no, not wearing tie-dye clothes and going to Grateful Dead gigs, I mean getting as many authoritative mentions on media you don’t own as possible. Guesting on podcasts, writing guest posts, being quoted by news organisations – encourage your authors to have and raise a professional profile. If one of your journalists is the go-to expert about a topic area, that will pay off over the long term in increases weight of their authority by Google, and the sum of their authority is your authority as a brand. 

There is no on-page or technical SEO fix for this. If your journalists spend all their time in the office churning out “me too” articles and never actually doing any work to raise their profile, they are never going to have enough authority. Set them free. Get them out making connections. Fly, my pretties, fly! 

Are you experienced?

This brings us nicely to the last point: experience. Not everyone noticed when, at the end of 2022, Google stopped talking about EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and added an extra E: Experience. As they put it at the time, “does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?”

Now, here’s another dirty little secret: quite a bit of affiliate-focused content out there is written with little or no actual experience of the product. Yes, that’s right, some people write reviews having never had the products in their hands. What, you think PRs are actually sending out products to hundreds and hundreds of big and small publishers for test? 

There was a good argument for this: doing reviews based on desk research was a time-saver. Rather than consumers having to comb through spec sheets and a thousand user reviews on Amazon, one journalist could do it well and get a better result, with the application of their expertise. But… it was always a bit of a cop-out, at least for major publishers who could get the real thing in for review.

In the era of experience, desk research is dead. You need to write from first-hand experience of the product, and you need to demonstrate it as often as you can in the copy. You are using first-person, right? Not only that, but you’re not still clinging to old-fashioned “we tested this” are you? If you are, 2024 is the year you stop doing that. It matters.  

Adapting to the new reality

This advice should be good for you in 2024, but it’s also vital as the foundation for the AI-driven search landscape to come. 

All three factors – originality, authorship, and expertise – are things that LLMs don’t have, and importantly probably will never have. Although a human can use an LLM to achieve original results, LLMs are, essentially, unoriginal thinkers. They are also not authors in their own right (no, LedeAI, you are not a journalist), so are unlikely to be able to build a profile outside your site. And while they have ingested a lot of expertise, LLMs are really experts in nothing – and, as good as it is, no one is going to invite Copilot on to the evening news to discuss anything (sorry Microsoft).

But here’s the thing: all of these human factors are expensive. Too many executives, particularly ones with boards that lack experience of frontline journalism (and yes, they do exist, and you can do your own research to find them) think that when journalists spend time not writing, they aren’t being productive. 

If your metrics are the number of articles, and not the quality of those articles, then you are going to struggle to adapt to the new reality. And then new reality really starts today.