3 scary ways Google Gemini is going to kill your blog
For the longest time, I’ve been thinking about moving my writing off this site and onto my own.
The rationale is simple: if you don’t own your platform, you’re vulnerable to all manner of changes that can have a huge impact on your income.
Take me for example.
I’m still smarting from massive changes to the payment program here that shifted pay from read time to engagement and torched the subscriber referral program that was a nice source of passive, recurring income for writers.
My earnings were chopped by 70% overnight before some later tweaks reduced the hit to about a 55% drop.
And what could I do about it?
Absolutely nothing.
I don’t own the platform, so my choices are to either:
Keep writing
Swallow that loss and quit
I’m still writing, but between you and me, I had plans to start building my own site over the next month or two and eventually shift over completely.
Now?
Now I’m not so sure anymore.
Recently, Google Gemini arrived in Canada, and I tried it for the first time.
And I believe it’s about to change everything.
Is this the end of blogs?
One of the main benefits of publishing your own blog is that you can load it with ads and make money from regular, open web traffic.
That’s obviously a lot different from a closed-off, paywalled site like this one, which feeds a built-in audience to your work.
With your own blog, you need to bring that big audience with you (for example, via a notable, pre-established social media presence) or build it over a long period of time.
Or you need to master search.
Being a Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) master who could drive a ton of traffic to your site based on Google or Bing queries was one way amateur publishers could make a ton of money.
This has become a lot tougher recently.
Google is always tweaking its algorithms, and I’ve seen and read a lot of stuff from bloggers suggesting that, at some point, the company started directing most of its traffic to bigger-name publishers and away from small blogs.
And if you ask me, blogging for search is about to get a whole lot tougher.
Enter Google Gemini
The reason for that? Google Gemini.
To be honest, I never really took to ChatGPT.
I wasn’t willing to pay extra for it, and the free version used outdated info.
I didn’t love the interface either, and it required more screens and sign-ins than I was willing to manage, given how much work I do online.
I did dabble with it, and the Dall-E 2 image generator was cool for blog art, but ultimately I just went back to finding info on Google.
So what happened when Google launched its own ChatGPT-killer?
I fell in love.
AI, Google style
I always figured that, when Google entered the AI chat, it would probably take the lead fairly quickly.
What do I like about it so much versus ChatGPT?
Reason 1: Credibility
The first reason I prefer Gemini to ChatGPT is credibility.
It may sound silly, but I’ve been doing Google searches for 20 years and I’ve always been happy with the results.
It’s fast, it’s simple, and I always get what I’m looking for without too much rooting around.
So if I’m going to use a chatbot that works based on aggregating search information, why wouldn’t I use the gold-standard search company?
I just trust Google more.
Reason 2: App integration
This one is really important.
Because I use Google for everything else already — Docs, Sheets, YouTube, Gmail, etc., this app just slides perfectly into the suite of products I already rely on.
So for example, you can ask Gemini to tell you what the most important emails in your inbox are and it’ll assess and give you a list.
Then, if you want, you can ask it to write replies for you.
Or you can ask Gemini to, say, show you 5 YouTube videos published in the last week on the topic of dividend investing, and it’ll show you something like this:
Now I still write back to people personally and do my own YouTube searches, but one thing I LOVE is that you can export Gemini’s answers to your Docs/Drive account instantly with the click of a button.
It even works for tables, as you can see in the graphic below:
So what does all of this have to do with the death of blogging?
The death of blogging
When you ask Gemini or ChatGPT to tell you about something, they’ll typically give you a bullet-point list with the information you need to know, right?
Here’s an example:
You’ll notice the AI just spat the facts out at me without links.
If you want source information, you have to ask.
And most people doing cursory research won’t bother to ask.
That means if you have a blog post explaining why cheetahs have black tear marks on their face fur, you’re not going to be in the mix anymore when it comes to search.
The more AI search is normalized and popularized — which Google will play a huge role in — the less likely you’ll be able to profit from search traffic.
Adapting to Gemini as an online creator
In my content journey, I’ve embraced two platforms in particular:
The one you’re reading now
This allows me to build out my content in four ways:
Written content
Subscription content with a built-in audience
Audiovisual
External/search traffic
This site takes care of the first two, my YouTube channel the second two.
To me, Gemini doesn’t really change anything for either — other than making my research a little easier.
More and more people prefer video to written content nowadays, and YouTube remains one of the biggest websites in the world.
It isn’t going anywhere, and even if people streamline their searching, they’re still going to be shown ads when they click through the video.
And Google search barely matters for this site because it doesn’t pay for external traffic anyway and you can’t get referred subscribers anymore.
If you ask me, YouTube is probably the way to go to monetize external traffic going forward, while subscription-based writing will become more valuable than open blogging.
How to win as a writer in the Google Gemini and ChatGPT world
When ChatGPT and, to a lesser extent, Jasper AI, first became popular, I wrote this article in response.
And I think the arguments still stand up today.
Here’s what I said:
“How do you beat the bots? Bring stuff into your writing they can’t.
“Work even harder to integrate your human thoughts and emotions into your work.
“Don’t go off on a 2,000-word tangent about something only you would care about, but allow yourself to be vulnerable.
“Allow yourself to be authentic.
“Instead of writing about ‘5 ways to hit the gym in 2023’, talk about how you got yourself back to the gym and why.
“What caused you to get out of shape in the first place?
“What was the one event or experience in your life that finally pushed you over the edge and back into the gym?
“What was it like going back? Was it hard? Was it easier than you thought? Why?
“Who was with you while all this was going on? What did they think about it? Did they say anything funny or interesting?
In summary, if you want to continue to be an online writer in the future, focus on things that only a human could write.
That’s how I plan to stay relevant in the world of Google Gemini.
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