I think you’re spot on with where technology is going and how much it’ll impact / change things but I also think as the technology becomes able to do more and more, there will be a need for good operators. Elevators are straightforward but ChatGPT for instance, not so much. You still need to know a good bit to get good (or even decent) output from the tech. It’s more like computer vs typewriter…

Thanks, Darcy!

I think the business model of affiliate sites as we know it today has 2 to 5 years left in it. Eventually, AI will change the game so much that affiliate marketing will be very different from what it is today.

In a way, AI has already done it. As Rand Fishkin recently said, AI content is the new bottom. If you can’t produce informational or commercial content that’s *at least as good* as what tools like ChatGPT, Content at Scale, or Autoblogging can, what’s the point of producing it at all?

And we’re still in the early days.

What happens when an AI tool is able to generate an entire blog based on a prompt? What used to take months of work and tens of thousands of dollars of investment would soon require a few seconds of patience to wait out the response to a prompt.

My take is that it’ll have serious implications for everybody in this business.

But it’s not just affiliate sites: AI is eliminating the barriers to entry into EVERY corner of media, big and small. And this is devaluating the assets of all the players in it.

Take photography. To sell a dozen stock photos, a photographer needs know-how, a high-end camera, and the time and money to travel to a scene or stage the scene in a studio. Now, they can just prompt Midjourney. And so can everyone else. We no longer need photographers, or their stock photos. And we definitely don’t need stock photo sites, the middlemen.

Music, too. You could argue that musicians no longer “own” their voice because anyone can train an algorithm on their music and produce new music without their — or their label’s — involvement. The same will happen to actors when companies like Runway and Nvidia figure out how to produce lifelike film at scale.

Doors used to have doormen, and elevators used to have operators. If most people in media are awaiting the same faith is a very important question, and my guess is as good as anyone else’s at this point in time. But I can’t shake off the feeling that there will be change, and it will happen at a bigger scale than most anticipate (and likely faster).

Dim

The site’s monetized with Ezoic Ads, so I insert ads with a combination of Ezoic’s Chrome extension, their WordPress plugin, and their automatically inserted AI placeholders (with insertion rules specific to the theme).

Product boxes for commercial content are inserted with Affiliatable, and I use Yoast SEO for adding schemas and no-indexing categories, tags, and certain pages. The rest of it is pretty much custom-coded WordPress plugins for specific things that I use across all my sites, really, like adding code to headers or tweaking the comment form.

Dim

Danish,

Most articles on this website rank for many keywords since they’re informational. When you divide one by the other, this gives us an average of 36.6 keywords per article, which isn’t all that much IMO.

Dim

Cheers, Thomas, and thanks for following along!

Dim