The Modern Reality of Online Publishing Comes For Opus

Earlier this month, Salon — one of the OG exemplars of online journalism — shut down unexpectedly after 31 years, citing the changing business realities of independent digital journalism. Salon’s announcement doesn’t go into detail, but anyone who’s been paying attention to online publishing these days can probably guess what those changing realities are: an ever-increasing number of publications and authors jockeying for subscriber dollars; changes to search engine behavior; and the preponderance of bots, which can overwhelm a website’s server even as they scrape its content for AI models.

Site owners can certainly take steps to ameliorate the effects of bots, but doing so is not without risk. I was given a harsh reminder of that earlier this year after I updated my Cloudflare settings in an effort to block AI training bots from accessing and scraping Opus. My updated settings were a little too strict, though, and I accidentally ended up blocking all bots — including legitimate ones like Googlebot, which builds Google’s search index. As a result, Opus all but vanished from Google, and it took me over a month to get back into the search engine’s good graces.

However, the true effect of bots on Opus didn’t really hit me until last month, when my website analytics revealed a sharp and sudden decline in traffic. As much as I try to avoid fixating on Opus’s analytics, the truth is that I do like to know how my site’s doing, what people are reading, and so on. And yes, it’s exciting to see traffic spike when one of my posts — like my recommendations for Howdy’s streaming catalog or my guide to removing AI from Google’s Chrome browser — goes semi-viral. As such, the sudden dip was alarming, and after some research, I found the cause: my website analytics provider, Tinylytics.

In late September, Tinylytics began filtering out traffic from Singapore, a major source of automated bot traffic, and a month later, they further expanded their blocking of bot traffic. Now to be clear, Tinylytics’ actions are precisely the sort of thing one should want from their website analytics provider. As a site owner, I want accurate numbers. I want to know how many human beings are visiting my site and reading my posts and reviews, because that’s who I’m writing for. Still, it’s disconcerting to learn that half or more of my site’s “readers” are, in fact, clankers, and I won’t deny that the sudden drop in Opus’s numbers was a bit of a blow to my ego.

So what does this mean? Well, it does not mean that I’m shutting down Opus, and especially not when the site’s 30th anniversary is coming up next year. And the truth is that even after Tinylytics’ adjustment, Opus is still doing decent numbers. But I don’t rely on advertising dollars, which are dependent on traffic, to keep the site running (though I’d certainly appreciate it if you, dear reader, became a subscriber). And as much as I’d love for Opus to be a full-time gig, the fact that it’s not — I have a day job to pay the bills — is probably a major factor contributing to its ongoing existence.

But more importantly, all of this is a reminder that while viral posts and traffic spikes can feel vindicating, that’s not why I started Opus in the first place, nor is it a good metric for determining what I should write about. In the end, I write because (1) I love writing and all of its related processes and (2) I love introducing people to the music, movies, books, etc., that I love. And both of those things have become increasingly valuable to me in our current age of AI, which consistently cheapens and diminishes human writing and publishing.