#Media#News#Journalism#SEO#AdTech#Search#SearchEngines: "[F]ew network effects have damaged the news more than Search Engine Optimization, where the allure of traffic from search engines like Google has led publishers to create content not with the goal of serving their audience, but attracting the spurious traffic that one might get from those searching "when does the Super Bowl start."
The result is a media industry in crisis. Desperate executives and disconnected editors twist their reporters' coverage to please Google's algorithms as a means of improving traffic to please advertisers' algorithms, creating content that looks and sounds the same as other outlets, which in turn leads to layoffs as profits fail to increase, which in turn normalizes and weakens the content created by the outlet. This is largely a result of those in power not actually consuming or producing any of the product that makes the outlet money, only understanding the business as a series of symbols that at some point create revenue, ostensibly from the written word and video.
When you make decisions for a website or company that produces words that it sells for money based not on the writing, but on how to twist that writing to make it "more profitable," the conclusion is always inevitable — the creation of identical-looking slop that people only read by accident, and the slow asphyxiation of journalism and culture.
It almost always leads to overstaffing and mismanagement, too. Any form of creative media requires an understanding that building an audience takes time and money, and that one cannot just spend a bunch of money to make that happen. But these craven idiots are as rotten as the rest of the economy (...) The media is being run by people that do not see value in people or the things that they create, but the metrics that come as a result."
