What is actually happening to publishing right now
What is actually happening to publishing right now
There is a piece circulating today asking what is happening to publishing. The easy answer is AI is killing writing. The more accurate answer involves advertising, platform economics, search traffic, the collapse of the middle tier, and AI as an accelerant on top of a fire that was already burning.
How publishing worked before it stopped working
The golden era of internet publishing, roughly 2005 to 2015, had a simple model. Write good things. Build an audience. Sell advertising or subscriptions. It worked well enough that a genuine middle class of writers emerged: people who were not famous, who did not work for major institutions, but who made a living from writing on the internet.
The platforms helped at first. Facebook pages reached audiences organically. Google indexed everything and sent readers to the best content. The relationship felt like a fair trade. It was not. It was an introductory offer.
The platform trap
Every major platform followed the same arc. Early days: generous organic reach to attract content. Growth phase: start charging for reach, organic distribution collapses. Mature phase: maximum extraction from creator content, minimum value returned. Facebook did this with pages. Google did it with search. Each change was individually defensible. Cumulatively they transferred value from content producers to platforms.
Where AI fits
AI did not create the publishing crisis but it is making it worse. Google's AI Overviews answer questions directly on the search page. The content that trained the model generates a pageview for Google and zero for the publisher. The platform uses your content to generate answers that make your content unnecessary.
Why I keep writing to nobody
My blog has no ads and no subscribers. I keep writing because the act forces understanding, because future me benefits from past me having written things down, and because occasionally someone finds something useful. This is not a model that scales. But it is not subject to algorithm changes or AI Overviews either. The words exist. The ones worth keeping will keep.