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There is so much fresh uncertainty following Google I/O, and I think it will take us all a while to process it and understand what it means. vale.rocks/micros/20260...

To play devil's advocate: this could be the end for a majority of ad-supported content websites, but many of these sites didn't offer a great experience to begin with. Maybe that means that the websites who survive are the ones who are directly supported by their community?

Do you have an example of websites that are directly financially supported by their community?

Podcasts, YouTubers, etc. often use Patreon. Websites could theoretically follow the same model?

Those are not directly supported. They are indirectly supported via big centralized huge platforms.

Someone using a tip jar or affiliate links on their site is getting support through those. Patreon and newsletter platforms give you a share of the subscription money but only the money people send to *you* not all the money anyone spends with them

Assuming they go directly to a product in a store, only if product store fronts stop offering fixed URLs to products. I don’t think we’re at the point of doing away with domain names yet?

AI response can just strip out retail store affiliate links (in an AI search product recommendation) and replace them with official product links or whatever else. In fact I'd be surprised if AI doesn't already strip out affiliate links in their training data (otherwise the source could be inferred)

Ah, gotcha; I think we’re both thinking of boring old humans clicking boring old links in a boring old web browser rather than someone going through an AI (I mean, technically an ad blocker extension could already strip affiliate links if you wanted to do that non manually)