winterbourne

Your comment made me look up "shower phone holder" on Amazon, and I regretted it.

Possibly related to "showerthoughts", in that removal of stimuli allows for latent realizations to surface.

The article doesn't address branding very much, but one of the theories for why laser-focused American brands (like Starbucks, KFC, or McDonald's) do so well in Japan is that Japanese mega-companies are too brand-diluted to compete with them.

That's true, those numbers don't work out for Google. But they have essentially unlimited resources to discover the exact threshold at which that person is just barely incentivized to keep their site active. $100K/year, reduced 80% to $20K/year? Still enough for them to keep their site up part-time? Etc.

The bulk of the traffic they're referring is essentially residual profitless goodwill left over from their "don't be evil" days.

AI verbosity is similar to AI sycophancy: a dark pattern, disguised as earnest assistance.

> If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.