> No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there.
Really? We make our living running a small web based publication; around 40k readers a month. I know of many other sites like this. Google, and other search engines, depends on niche websites to provide quality search results. Without sites like ours, the internet would truly be dead, and search would be mostly useless. Our "traffic sources" come from a mix of Facebook, Search, Reddit, etc, in addition to our many loyal readers.
Others in our niche are producing blog spam, which looks nearly identical to people who aren't experts in the field, but we have real experts, fact checkers, etc, as part of our production process. This is a big problem: These low quality websites get similar rankings to our own, which does make it much harder for people to get quality information via search. (Hence the general shift towards trusting social recommendations, such as from Reddit.)
In short, the WWW is alive and well, it's just buried under a bunch of #$#$%.
> Our "traffic sources" come from a mix of Facebook, Search, Reddit, etc, in addition to our many loyal readers.
40k/mo is a pretty good number for an independent website. As a word of warning though, relying on social media reach is a dangerous game, as there is anecdotal evidence that tweets with outbound links don't get as many impressions as those that link to in-site content, like another Twitter post.
As for Facebook, well, there's a good comic from The Oatmeal (enormously popular on FB back in 2010) that talks about what happened in the long run:
Really? We make our living running a small web based publication; around 40k readers a month. I know of many other sites like this. Google, and other search engines, depends on niche websites to provide quality search results. Without sites like ours, the internet would truly be dead, and search would be mostly useless. Our "traffic sources" come from a mix of Facebook, Search, Reddit, etc, in addition to our many loyal readers.
Others in our niche are producing blog spam, which looks nearly identical to people who aren't experts in the field, but we have real experts, fact checkers, etc, as part of our production process. This is a big problem: These low quality websites get similar rankings to our own, which does make it much harder for people to get quality information via search. (Hence the general shift towards trusting social recommendations, such as from Reddit.)
In short, the WWW is alive and well, it's just buried under a bunch of #$#$%.