I have long said people go online to do two things one of two ways. They go online to:
- Learn about something, or
- Be entertained
And they do this in one of two ways:
- Reading, or
- Watching
You can squint at some things, like audiobooks and podcasts. That’s obviously “listening.” But the overlap in these methods and mediums is pretty big. And many things can overlap between learning and entertainment. For instance, you might research buying a new TV by reading pages, researching reviews, watching YouTube videos, and so on.
But the core gist of why people go online has always universally led to learning or entertainment.
For a small number of people, the Internet is a place for creation of the stuff people watch, read, learn about, and interact with. This stuff has included blogging, reporting, videos, “rich media”, and a host of other terms over 30 years. Today it gets distilled to the dull and degrading, “content.”
Powering all of this has been search engines. For nearly the entire history of the Internet, people turn to search engines to help them find specific things. This discovery has been aided and complemented by social media in the last 15 or so years, mostly since 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone and mobile computing.
I believe internet search is about to change dramatically in the next two years. Probably in the next 12 months as big players like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now OpenAI jostle for prime new positions among a bifurcated social media landscape.
Internet search is about to eliminate the “how” and “what” questions
A great deal of Googling answers “factual questions.” Things like, “When did John Adams die?” This has a clear, knowable, verifiable, and unassailable answer of July 4, 1826. When you Google this, this answer appears in “position 0”, above all the other search results.
Google and others have had some of this “position 0” material for a while. But now AI summarization, for better or worse and regardless of accuracy, is starting to supplant more complex questions, like, “Who died on July 4, 1826?”
This is convenient for a lot of Internet searchers. I can also tell you young people love this because “it just gives the answer.”
It also eliminates the need for a person to “click through” to a site offering responses about this query. I imagine in the next couple of years the value of any Who, What, When, Where, How, and some Why question/answer pages online will be nothing but fodder for machines to gobble up and spit back out to people. This tension is unlikely to be resolved in favor of smaller sites and creators and is why I have abandoned much focus on the “knowable” pages and posts.
This eliminated click means reduced traffic to sites like yours. This equates to fewer people next to your sign up forms, commerce, donations, other posts, etc.
Moving beyond search
Google says that their early tests of Gemini AI searches has shown a lot of people are using their AI summaries for results, but these same users are clicking through more often to the sites cited. I believe this now because most people do not trust this technology. But as AI results improve, and younger generations age with it comfortably in their workflow, this will cease to be the case.
I’m interested in thinking about “What’s next?” for how small sites like yours compete and appear with relevance, interest, and hold attention.
I’m also interested in thinking about, “What’s the next moat?” for most small sites. One strategy that has worked in the past is simply “producing more.” Most places and people just don’t have the capacity to create and expanding their sites. Simply making stuff automatically leapfrogs 95% of a person’s competitors, even if those competitors are other nonprofits or groups. We’re all competing for limited attention, money, and time.
My current line of thinking on the next moat is is:
- Whoever maintains expertise and authority and shares that expertise the most will win, and be rewarded with more authority.
- The “page that answers basic information” must evolve again to something that goes much deeper and is more humane. We’ve seen this before, as “Resources” and “Links” pages have long been useless when people just Google their way to the same and better results.
- The bar for quality is now even higher, as people demand it in all but the most niche and humble circumstances. When there are YouTubers producing videos with budgets, staff, and effects that rival even modest cable channels like Discovery, a video of someone starting with “Hey guys!” in an echo-filled room is not going to cut it.
- The “Canva-ification” of a lot of design templates is likely to closely associate that aesthetic with low-effort, low-attention material. Much of it is designed to work for anyone, which means like bolding all the text in a Word document, it works for no one.
Rethinking an approach to sites and brands
It is clear to me that going forward the approach for every group or organization that wants to garner attention, command authority, maintain a community, and build a business or operation must include a mix of channels and tactics:
- Podcasts
- Videos (educational, entertaining, or preferably both)
- Infographics
- Original research and data (like surveys and reports)
- New and old social media channels
- Direct conversation
- Case studies
- Manual outreach
I still maintain despite it sounding self-serving that a website should be the center of everyone’s digital universe. Only because it’s the only thing you can own, along with subscribers in an email list. For every other channel, you are just a creator for some other company, like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google (YouTube), Microsoft (LinkedIn), etc.
And in all these circumstances we must maintain and focus on the humanity of it all.
So if someone asks, “When did John Adams die?” or even “Who died on July 4, 1826?” someone is out there with the insight to say, “John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, precisely 50 years to the day of the founding of the country they helped found. Both former political enemies developed a strong friendship late in life and each died thinking the other was still alive.”
The challenge in all this, of course, is that it’s expensive, time-consuming, and requires mastery in more places than ever. And in some cases it may never make sense, like law firms operating on TikTok. In others, it may seem far-fetched but plausible, like writing a book.
The other hope is that a large segment of the world recognizes that, for likely a little while, AI-generated stuff — accurate or not – and low-value graphics, videos, etc., are the equivalent of highly processed food. For a lot of people a chicken McNugget is what they want, even if they know they shouldn’t. I am uninterested in serving AI McNuggets when I could be serving people nourishment.
Ultimately, we have to start thinking more about how to interact with other people online (not just blindly posting out there and letting people consume), finding new ways to educate and entertain, and provide nourishment in a world that is likely to fall quickly for fast, cheap, and vapid content.
