In the Era of Google Zero, We're Going Old School

It's not a secret. Online publications of all stripes, all sizes, have been in a knock-down drag-out fight for survival. It was easier in the boom days of the early 2010s. Facebook and Google and Twitter would direct their massive and consolidated audiences to your site, the ads on your posts would get the requisite clicks and eyeballs, and you'd get paid for the fruits of your labor. It wasn't perfect, but it was manageable.

The current media ecosystem looks nothing like that of the past. Social media behemoths have built walled gardens. No external links, no clicking out of the network. "Pivot to video" never really worked for the legacy brands, but it did play pretty damn well for individual content creators on TikTok, which peeled even more eyeballs and attention from articles and blogs. The only traffic source that remained for the legacy sites was Google, but that well is rapidly running dry. Google's deeply-flawed AI Overview feature is eliminating more and more click-throughs; "Google Zero" or "zero-click" looms on the horizon. It's a doomsday scenario for any site that relies on Google search traffic and ad revenue to survive, which is pretty much all of them.

On top of the revenue loss, the AI Overview feature has destroyed one of the few legitimate delights of the old internet: discovery and exploration. When you clicked through that Google search result to find the Week Zero football schedule, you'd find a blog, a writer, a site, something real. It might have been entirely new to you. You might have seen it before, but forgotten about it after a year or three. But there was an aspect of discovering something novel and tangible. Now, Google's AI Overview will give you an incorrect medical diagnosis, a recommendation that you add glue to your pizza, and a short synopsis of why nuclear armageddon might be beneficial to the planet. AI Overview, along with the ChatGPTs of the world, are often confidently and casually incorrect, but they're pulling their raw data from real sites, ones that you'll never click through to discover and peruse and enjoy.

What to do, then? Some sites are opting out of Google AI Overview, but this also pulls them out of Google search results. If you aren't on Google, you don't exist. Some are actively pivoting to entice the gaze of the AI bots as a means of survival, coordinating their content explicitly for ChatGPT to suck it up. Some are adding paywalls, while others are trying to turn themselves into an ersatz social network. Others lean on podcasts, premium content, tip jars, merch. Anything, anything at all to remain profitable while the Google search click-throughs continue their slouch down to zero.

With that 400 word preamble out of the way, how does this relate to this humble Midwestern sports and culture site (founded in 1864, don'cha know)? Put simply: We don't have banner ads or pop-ups or autoplay videos. We're not optimized for search engines or ChatGPT. We're not making money off of this. We're a community of like-minded college sports obsessives raging against the dying of the light of the collegiate sports that we love. We're kind of old-fashioned (and some of us make our old fashioneds with brandy).

So here's the ask, the deal we make with you, our wonderful readers: We promise not to rely on the Google ad and search game, but we need you to do something too. Spread the word about OTR.

Maybe you have a friend, a father, a daughter, a colleague, an enemy, or a neighbor that is a casual college sports fan. Tell them about us. Send a link or share your favorite article. We started this thing just over a month ago, but this is only the test phase in the college sports dead zone; the cool shit is coming down the pike. We're just weeks from Big Ten football and volleyball, only a few months from basketball tipping off. Spread the word.

While others pivot to generative AI and chatbots to find their traffic, we're turning to the water cooler, the grapevine, the OG social media network: word of mouth. If you get what we're trying to build here, tell someone. We hope you'll both stick around.