A Passing Fad or a Real Collapse? Thoughts on the Disappearing Web Audience
There's an endgame atmosphere creeping into digital. Between the alarmists selling fear and those preaching the latest "hack" like gospel, it's time for an honest diagnosis. The machine—the one that promised infinite growth—is seizing up.
There is a story here, but not the one you think. Today's designated culprits are just the gravediggers, arriving to bury a body that was already cold. The scheduled death of third-party cookies already doomed the old tracking model. AI isn't the bad chef; it's the microwave oven. It simply industrialized the production of informational junk food, a concept born from an already failing economic model.
This is for those who believe in producing for production's sake. AI also exists to push us to do far better, to think on another level. Those using Generative AI daily know exactly what I mean. Of course, everyone uses this tool as they see fit: either to learn, or to needlessly burn electricity in data centers.
UX pollution by Ads.
The result is a great cultural inversion.
We celebrated mediocrity. Algorithms, fed by our obsession with engagement-at-all-costs, learned to prefer reaction over reflection. User experience? Irrelevant. Disrespected.
This inversion isn't just a feeling; it has direct, measurable economic consequences. For e-commerce, it means a drop in organic click-through rates as high as 34% (Source: Ahrefs) and an exploding acquisition cost, up nearly 60% in five years (Source: SimplicityDX / Forbes).
The real sickness is here. It's the bankruptcy of the advertising model that made mass traffic a dogma. To feed this appetite, content had to be fast and cheap. Quality was never the goal; capturing attention was.
For the user, it's a protective reflex: over 42% of them use an ad-blocker (Source: Hootsuite). So yes, social shopping has a future, because users' addiction and fear of the void are stoked by delirious promises. No interest in the product? It doesn't matter. We celebrate the volume of 'easy'. Above all, don't think.
— "But Frédéric, this is what the public wants. Simple. Fast."
— "It's what we taught them to consume. We made intellectual junk food so accessible that we've forgotten the taste of anything else. The web was not meant to be a supermarket of the void. It was a space for freedom. Call me naive (I don't mind)."
This isn't a passing crisis. It's a profound shift. The verdict is simple: the race for mass engagement is a dead end.
What if the solution is to imagine new economic models for publishers, creators, editorial sites, and news outlets? Why shouldn't this be possible? Make users pay to navigate an 'enriched' web, boosted by generative AI? Look at the proposals from Perplexity or Cloudflare, which allow revenue sharing by offering a different user experience and finally compensating content creators.
We must change the game, not just the strategy. Stop trying to capture attention, and start earning it.
The future no longer belongs to the loudest voice, but to the one worth the journey.
It is harder work, certainly. More demanding, absolutely. But it is the only work that deserves our attention. And this is where it all truly begins again.
So, are we actually ready to start?
Question ?
Contact me to discuss digital strategy, SEO, SEA/SMA, Generative AI, and e-Commerce regarding your business, training, or project needs.
I aim to respond within 48 hours (excluding public holidays and vacation periods). Thank you for your understanding.