Committee to Protect Journalists / CPJ Staff
TechCrunch / Kyle Wiggers
Futurism / Maggie Harrison Dupré
Meet AdVon, the AI-powered content monster infecting the media industry →“AdVon engages in what Google calls ‘site reputation abuse’: it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like ‘best ab roller.’ The idea seems to be that these visitors will be fooled into thinking the recommendations were made by the publication’s actual journalists and click one of the articles’ affiliate links, kicking back a little money if they make a purchase.”
Press Gazette / Aisha Majid
First Google core update of 2024 brings bad news for most news publishers →“Data from SEO tool Sistrix shows that of 70 leading news publishers tracked by Press Gazette…all but 15 saw falls in their visibility score. Of those, almost half (33) saw declines in the double-digits. Sistrix’s Visibility Index measures how successful a website is in Google search results, assigning higher scores to sites that rank better in search results.”
The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
The New York Times added 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1 →“The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. The company’s goal is 15 million total subscribers by the end of 2027.”
Press Gazette / Bron Maher