nilay patel

After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. And that if you run a media business that doesn't have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche, or a direct audience, you're going to be fighting hostile algo changes all the way down. He describes a recent board meeting: "We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago. And what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the ten blue links." "Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get sponsored stuff." "Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we'd put forecasts in of search traffic declining. Because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative." "Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there's no search.' You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic."

@samsheffer I have a completely unrelated question. Why is The Verge terrible now? Ever since Josh left along with many of the original crew, it’s been an absolute dumpster fire. I mean, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the website it used to be.

This is exactly why people are abandoning mainstream media: cheap insults instead of actual reporting You don’t have to agree with @DavidSacks on everything, but pretending he “sucks” while ignoring his actual track record is unserious. A few reminders: -Co-founded PayPal, one of the most consequential fintech platforms in history. -Built Yammer, sold to Microsoft for $1.2B -Backed Airbnb, SpaceX, Facebook, Uber, OpenAI, and Palantir in their early days -Hosts All-In, one of the most influential political podcasts -Major philanthropist and consistent supporter of free speech and open debate If the media wants to rebuild trust, maybe start by covering people honestly instead of writing headlines like YouTubers chasing clicks