Thoughts on Anandtech and written media

When I first got into computers, I read a lot of articles from technology focused journals. I frequented sites like HardOCP, Tom’s Hardware, Guru3D, Extreme Tech, Engadget, and of course Anandtech. These articles were well written and often went into great detail to explain the underpinnings of new hardware and technology. I thoroughly enjoyed them and would regularly read through them even if I wasn’t in a position to buy the hardware they were reviewing. I wanted that understanding of the industry, technology, and how it all interacts. I learned tremendously during that era, the early 2000s through early 2010s.

What has happened since then has been a tremendous shift in how people, including myself, access that kind of information. The proliferation of video streaming online has been a boon for independent journalists and writers who have been able to shift from written to spoken and video. The absolutely explosive growth of YouTube in particular has centralised the majority of those people into a single place making finding multiple sources of information incredibly easy. But, that monopolisation of creative output has also caused the collapse of other sources just as quickly.

As that has happened, the other aspect that has done incredible damage has been the constant fighting between readers and viewers, and with these websites hosting the content, vis-à-vis advertisements. Yes, back in the heyday of malicious popups, Flash ads, and other painfully intrusive advertisements from the late-90s through mid-2010s was horrendous in its own right. Ads then were overtly dangerous and malicious, especially if you ventured to the less scrupulous parts of the internet. They would fight for your attention by being as loud and obnoxious as possible.

However, that has dramatically shifted since the early-2010s. Advertisements have become even greater in number, more intrusive, but far more intelligently designed to exploit anyone who views them. They’re governed by the ever-growing trove of user data, becoming far more pointed to the individual readers and viewers rather than the shotgun approach that had come from radio, print media, and television before. In response to the greater and greater pressures asserted via ad companies, the pushback became equally powerful in the form of ad blocking.

I know I started to ad block, adding a small collection of sites to a whitelist that I knew were less heavy-handed in their approach, and especially to who I would regularly visit to read their articles. I did that more than twenty years ago, partly due to the concerns voiced by many of those same tech sites talking about the maliciousness of ads on other parts of the internet at the time. It was a mess. And it wasn’t even that I ever, intentionally, clicked on ads. So many at the time were popups that would even have buttons removed, would move about the screen, would be hidden off screen, and so many other unscrupulous and outright malicious tricks.

I was hardly the only one to do that at the time. To simply add an ad blocker to the basic setup of any computer much like running an antivirus and antimalware service. And so, ad makers innovated as well, to make their ads sneak through the blockers, to purposefully break sites if they detected an ad blocker, and countless other methods. It’s been a constant battle between these groups that has continued to become more heated over the years. And it’s not been helped by ad companies, including Google’s Adsense, hosting malicious and dangerous ads for sites and companies that themselves are malicious and dangerous. Sometimes they advertise for illegal goods and services. Sometimes for manipulative advertising for conspiracy theories and political manipulation.

That has been seen through the massive push to sponsored content, especially in top search results. Often, the best content is now hidden, buried under a veritable mountain of sponsored content and ads. The push toward AI content has exacerbated that issue due to the poor quality and oversight of said AI generated content. It has meant that even great resources have to pay more and more to Google to maintain that top spot, lest they be buried beneath the flood of garbage. And that’s simply not feasible. The combination of paying more to simply maintain a presence online, of fighting to convince users to pay or whitelist ads, and to fight against the massive drive to video over written work has pushed this to breaking.

Anandtech will hardly be the last of these old sites to disappear. It was most assuredly not the first. But it is going to keep atrophying. This is the continuation of consolidation and squeezing out of smaller, more specialised creators. They’re no longer articles, journals, or videos, but instead content to be consumed by as broad an audience as possible. That it must continue to grow infinitely, despite the impossibility of that. We’ve created an ouroboros consuming its own tail and eventually it’s going to choke and die. Whether or not we’ll have the promised rebirth after that death is yet to be seen but, given the trend, I don’t have a rosy prognostication to offer.