Making the web faster and more user-friendly
The web is dead, long live the web (repost in English)
👀 The author of this article is Antonio Moro aka Itomi.
🇮🇹 Original article | Itomi Studio | About | Shop
The closure of Badtaste.it is just the latest closing on a coffin that has already been closed for years: online publishing as we have known it for the past twenty years is now dead and buried.
Yesterday, news broke that Badtaste.it is shutting down after 20 years of activity. It’s not a surprise, at least not to me. It’s just the latest signal among many over the last five years. And anyone blaming the pandemic has understood very little about what’s really happened.
I’m one of those who has been part of “online publishing,” as it’s been fashionably called for years, in Italy since its inception—back when it was simply called “posting on a blog.” The party lasted 20 years, then it ended. And even if some are lingering at the exit, there’s not much to be done. The music has stopped.
Thankfully, I had the clarity to get out before it completely imploded. Three years ago, I stepped down from the leadership of the site I founded and directed for 12 years and started a publishing house based on a completely different project—one that returns to the physical object and abandons the "all digital" concept so cherished by this industry over the last two decades.
The web is dead, and it largely killed itself. It killed itself when it let a single company and a single search engine dictate the rules upon which it relied.
It killed itself when it handed over the communities it painstakingly built over the years to a few social networks.
For years, Google dictated how online articles had to be written, published, and formatted. What keywords and how many needed to be included in every piece for it to even make sense to publish. We stopped writing for our audience and, without even realizing it, started writing for Google’s algorithm—to get more traffic, more people onto our content. We became addicted to a substance that never nourished us: blind, useless traffic made up of people who didn’t even know what they were reading or where they were reading it. We erased the identities of our sites and blogs, turning them into sterile containers of personality-free content.
Facebook, the only other strong source of traffic, finished the job. It took away our communities, our loyal readers. It took away interactions, devouring what we had built. The moment we started seeing “Comments: Zero” as normal under our articles, our sites began dying irreversibly.
We abandoned a small, loyal, and engaged audience for a large, disinterested, and unaware one.
Blogs and editorial sites were born because a few enthusiasts wanted to share their ideas, opinions, and content. We did it for free, in our spare time. And those who read us did so for free. And we were happy with that.
Then it became a job, and figuring out how to make money from it became crucial. Once we’d given away the fruits of our labor—our content—the only option left was to monetize through banners and ad campaigns.
On Lega Nerd, I resisted for years, doing only “native” campaigns with advertisers aligned to my niche, keeping banner ads to a minimum because they killed readability and the overall user experience. Over time, the Internet economy and online advertising shifted more and more toward new players—today we call them “influencers,” but they’re just content creators like we were, only doing it differently and on other platforms, reaching massive audiences.
It took advertisers a few years to grasp the power of influencers, but eventually, the money moved to creators. Running a campaign for your site was already difficult five years ago, let alone today.
Now, the gods of websites are banners. They exploded at the end of the 2010s, thanks to the rise of “Real-Time Bidding” platforms that boosted their profitability, and we dove into this new opportunity, filling our sites with crap. Crap in every paragraph. Crap popping up over content. Crap autoplaying and staying fixed as you scroll to read. Crap everywhere.
We needed more traffic, and we chased it by any means necessary. More traffic equaled more page views, more page views equaled more banners shown, and more banners equaled more money to keep the ship afloat.
We needed more traffic from Google, so we wrote what it wanted, rebuilt our sites from scratch to its specifications, optimized everything as it dictated.
We needed more traffic from social media, so we started publishing hundreds, thousands of news stories. Current events. Just a few lines, little substance, but enough for people scrolling through Facebook mindlessly. Thousands of news pieces per day. Then we went for clickbait—to make people click and land on our sites. And fake news—hundreds, thousands of sites created solely to generate traffic and monetize banners.
Crap, covered in more crap.
And those who genuinely believed in it, who wanted to publish interesting, independent, educational, informative content? They’re screwed.
Screwed because they can’t compete with those who play by those rules without turning their site into crap too. Do you want to make a living, or do you want to write for a handful of people and earn nothing?
The pandemic years further inflated the web artificially. Traffic grew, banners multiplied even more, and users’ patience ran out. It was only a couple of years of good news for publishers before plunging back into reality.
Now banners pay almost nothing. Campaigns are gone. Monetizing an editorial site is harder than ever. We’ve made the web ugly, and now no one wants to look at it. People get their information elsewhere, without having to endure the crap that covers internet sites.
We gave away our content for 20 years, and now no one wants to pay for it—especially after we published crap for years. No subscriptions. No “premium” areas. Nothing works anymore, and we don’t know where to turn.
It’s time to close. To do something else.
The young will figure out something new, something innovative and suited to the times. Fast times. Brutal times.
I see a faint return to the past. Small communities of people tired of the bulimia of social media are emerging. Small editorial projects are being born that use the web but don’t rely solely on it. The web will never truly die.
The web is dead. Long live the web.