Bonsai Nut
Nuttier than your average Nut
I am posting this on the general discussion forum because it directly impacts the future direction of this site.
As you may be aware, Google, and particularly Google's ham-handed attempt to steal the Internet, is causing huge upheaval among global content creators. Google adsense ads currently cover 90% of this site's revenues, with donations (thank you!) and our relationship with Wazakura covering the rest. This relationship has worked well, because as traffic has increased, and bandwidth and storage costs have increased, Google revenues have risen at the same pace, so that the site continued to pay for itself.
In the last year, and particularly in the last six months, Google has been scraping content from this site (and content sites all over the Internet), tossing it into an AI "blender" to disguise the source of their content, and then regurgitating it on their search engine as if it belonged to them. If you do basic searches on bonsai topics in Google, you will frequently see content from this site, without reference or backlinks to this site. Even though our site traffic continues to remain healthy, our ad revenues are plunging - down more than 40% in the last year. I am seriously wondering about the end game - and whether our relationship with Google is shooting ourselves in the foot.
In my opinion, it would be as if Pepsi was posting ads on Netflix, and used that advertising access as a channel to download all of Netflix's content. Then they used AI to blend Netflix's content and if you did a search for any of Netflix's series, instead what would pop up would be Pepsi AI driven entertainment... with no acknowledgement or revenue share with Netflix. It is the world's greatest content piracy attempt - literally Google trying to download the entire Internet and repost it as its own.
To add insult to injury, I woke up this morning to find Google spamming the site with autoads - advertising that it chooses when and where to place. I did not approve this, I did not initiate it, and it took quite a bit of effort to undo it. Perhaps it is a result of Google's anti-trust hearings, when they reported that ad revenue across the board was down 40%? Considering this is by far the largest segment of Google's businesses, it almost sounds like an admission of an existential threat to their business model - which they themselves created.
We have limited options, because as long as we continue to offer content outside of a membership wall (paid or unpaid) Google can continue to steal it. If you wonder why all news content is now behind paywalls... well there you go. And to be honest, I am still looking into whether giving Google ad serving privileges behind the membership wall allows them to steal content. They have the ability to scan content - to make sure, for example, that they aren't posting ads to adult-themed content, etc. My concern is that in their minds - scanning gives them the right to take it and feed it into their AI models and "poof" magically it becomes theirs.
Starting today I am going to turn off all image serving to non-members. Currently people were able to see thumbnails, but I have to turn that access off to prevent the theft of our image archives.
Longer term, I think the only option may be to seal all content behind a membership wall and drop all Google ads. If we do that we will either need to charge a nominal membership fee (like $2 per month) or find a number of sponsors willing to underwrite the site and sell our own ads. The sponsorship side, of course, requires a lot of work and upkeep, and I am already putting in a ton of time just on the technical side. I would prefer to charge a fee, because it would be much easier to execute. On the positive side, all the ads would go away, and the site experience would probably improve. A lot of front-end lag on this site is due to the site waiting for Google to serve ads before it renders the rest of the page.
(This is an indication of what we are dealing with - revenue from Google per 1000 page views over the last year)
As you may be aware, Google, and particularly Google's ham-handed attempt to steal the Internet, is causing huge upheaval among global content creators. Google adsense ads currently cover 90% of this site's revenues, with donations (thank you!) and our relationship with Wazakura covering the rest. This relationship has worked well, because as traffic has increased, and bandwidth and storage costs have increased, Google revenues have risen at the same pace, so that the site continued to pay for itself.
In the last year, and particularly in the last six months, Google has been scraping content from this site (and content sites all over the Internet), tossing it into an AI "blender" to disguise the source of their content, and then regurgitating it on their search engine as if it belonged to them. If you do basic searches on bonsai topics in Google, you will frequently see content from this site, without reference or backlinks to this site. Even though our site traffic continues to remain healthy, our ad revenues are plunging - down more than 40% in the last year. I am seriously wondering about the end game - and whether our relationship with Google is shooting ourselves in the foot.
In my opinion, it would be as if Pepsi was posting ads on Netflix, and used that advertising access as a channel to download all of Netflix's content. Then they used AI to blend Netflix's content and if you did a search for any of Netflix's series, instead what would pop up would be Pepsi AI driven entertainment... with no acknowledgement or revenue share with Netflix. It is the world's greatest content piracy attempt - literally Google trying to download the entire Internet and repost it as its own.
To add insult to injury, I woke up this morning to find Google spamming the site with autoads - advertising that it chooses when and where to place. I did not approve this, I did not initiate it, and it took quite a bit of effort to undo it. Perhaps it is a result of Google's anti-trust hearings, when they reported that ad revenue across the board was down 40%? Considering this is by far the largest segment of Google's businesses, it almost sounds like an admission of an existential threat to their business model - which they themselves created.
We have limited options, because as long as we continue to offer content outside of a membership wall (paid or unpaid) Google can continue to steal it. If you wonder why all news content is now behind paywalls... well there you go. And to be honest, I am still looking into whether giving Google ad serving privileges behind the membership wall allows them to steal content. They have the ability to scan content - to make sure, for example, that they aren't posting ads to adult-themed content, etc. My concern is that in their minds - scanning gives them the right to take it and feed it into their AI models and "poof" magically it becomes theirs.
Starting today I am going to turn off all image serving to non-members. Currently people were able to see thumbnails, but I have to turn that access off to prevent the theft of our image archives.
Longer term, I think the only option may be to seal all content behind a membership wall and drop all Google ads. If we do that we will either need to charge a nominal membership fee (like $2 per month) or find a number of sponsors willing to underwrite the site and sell our own ads. The sponsorship side, of course, requires a lot of work and upkeep, and I am already putting in a ton of time just on the technical side. I would prefer to charge a fee, because it would be much easier to execute. On the positive side, all the ads would go away, and the site experience would probably improve. A lot of front-end lag on this site is due to the site waiting for Google to serve ads before it renders the rest of the page.
(This is an indication of what we are dealing with - revenue from Google per 1000 page views over the last year)
Last edited:
