Mon. 06/16 – What Happens When Search Abandons The Web?

Welcome to the Tech Me Right Home for Monday, June 16th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, ads finally come to WhatsApp. Are we about to get a literal Trump phone? More ads on your TV. All ads are about to become AI. And at the end of the show, a bit of an essay from me about Google AI and what I think is about to happen to the larger web. if search abandons the web. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. For the first time ever, WhatsApp.

has ads. WhatsApp has rolled out ads in its updates tab. Meta says it will collect some data to target these ads, but says it has no plans to put ads in chats. Quoting the Times. On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as

location and the device's default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it has no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages. from WhatsApp's original philosophy.

Jan Combe and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption, a method of keeping texts, photos, videos, and phone calls inaccessible by third parties. But both left the company's

years ago. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, has focused on WhatsApp's growth and user privacy while also melding the app into the company's other products, including Instagram and Messenger. Putting ads into WhatsApp opens a lucrative opportunity for Meta which has spent billions of dollars on artificial intelligence and other pursuits while potentially raising questions about privacy.

WhatsApp, which unveiled the changes at the Khan Lions Advertising Industry Conference, also said it was introducing paid monthly subscriptions for content creators similar to offerings from competitors like X, YouTube, and Twitch.

The app will also let users and businesses advertise their channels, which are one-way broadcasts that can be sent to large groups of people. In a statement, Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, assured users that the app would remain secure and guard their privacy. We work hard to protect them. privacy of people's communications, he said, some people only use WhatsApp for private chats and calls and nothing is changing about that, end quote.

Well, there was speculation that Elon Musk might do this, but did anyone think the president would end up doing it? The Trump Organization is teasing a $499 T1 phone, a gold phone, quote, designed and built in the U.S., and Trump Mobile, an MVNO that uses AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Quoting Variety, the Trump Organization on Monday announced Trump Mobile, which will offer 5G service with an unlimited plan.

$47 plan priced at $47.45 per month. The new venture joins the lineup of the company's other businesses, which span luxury hotels, golf clubs, casinos, retail, and other real estate properties. The president's two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, made the announcement at a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Customers can switch to Trump Mobile's T1 mobile service using their current phone.

In addition, in August, Trump Mobile plans to release the T1 phone described as, quote, a sleek gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier. Trump Mobile is going to change the

the game, Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement, we're building on the movement to put America first and we will deliver the highest level of quality and service. Our company is based right here in the United States because we know it's what our customers want and deserve, end quote.

Trump Mobile functions as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MVNO, offering 5G service through the three U.S. major wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA. Other examples of MVNOs include Consumer Cellular and Ryan...

Reynolds' Mint Mobile. Trump Mobile and its carrier partners are subject to regulatory oversight by the Federal Communications Commission, which is headed by Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. The Trump T1 phone, which runs Google's Android operating system, will cost $490. $99. It features a 6.8-inch touchscreen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The smartphone also has a...

fingerprint sensor and AI face unlock, according to the company's website. Trump Mobile didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about what company is manufacturing the Android phone. The Trump Organization said Trump Mobile's customer service team is based in the United States and available 24 hours a day. When customers call, they're talking to a real person, according to the company. The Trump Mobile 47 plan benefits include complete device protection.

24-hour roadside assistance through Drive America, free international calling to more than 100 countries, telehealth services, including virtual medical care, mental health support, and ordering of prescription medications. The plan does not require subscribers to sign any contracts, and there are Again, this is the news chasing us in terms of things we've talked about. In this case, advertising on whatever modern TV viewing is these days, or is becoming.

Amazon Ads and Roku have signed an ad initiative that will give media buyers access to more than 80% of U.S. connected TV households set to launch in Q4 2025 using Amazon's DSP. Quoting Deadline. The new offering is expected to hit the market by the fourth quarter of 2025. Amazon's Demand Side Platform, or DSP, will be used to place ads on top-viewed platforms like the Roku Channel and Prime Video, along with other services available via Roku and Fire TV operating systems.

In early trials, the integration has yielded strong results according to the companies. Ads placed via the new setup reached 40% more unique viewers without any additional cost to the buyer and reduced the frequency of how often ads were shown to the same person by almost 30%.

That outcome equates to triple the value for the same ad spend compared to previous options. The integration uses what the company's described as a custom identity resolution service, which allows the Amazon DSP to recognize logged in viewers across. the Roku operating system and devices in the U.S. That capability is aimed at increasing targeting, end quote.

We mentioned that one AI-created TV ad last week. We did that story about how Meta expects the whole process of producing ads and running them to be push-button 100% AI managed in about a year or so. But I'm not sure how much people realize that everything advertising, especially on the web, is about to become 100% AI generated.

TikTok has rolled out new AI ad features as part of its Symphony ad suite, including the ability for marketers to use text or images to generate five-second videos. Quoting Bloomberg, TikTok is rolling out a set of new artificial intelligence-powered advertising features, including the ability for marketers to use text or still images to create AI-generated video for the service.

Marketers can upload an image of a product they want to feature or write a short text prompt describing the kind of video ad that they want. And TikTok's AI tools will produce various five-second clips that can then be used in an ad the company announced Monday. The text and image-to-video features are part of TikTok's existing Symphony product, which was unveiled in 2024 to help brands create advertisements using generative AI.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, already lets advertisers use AI-enhanced spokespeople, referred to as avatars, to help promote and sell their products on the video app. AI-generated ads are becoming more popular as major platforms like TikTok and meta platforms seek ways to lower the cost of production, which in turn may give small businesses more money to spend promoting ads.

TikTok's new tools were announced in conjunction with the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, which is happening this week in the south of France. AI-generated advertisements are likely to be a major theme of the conference, end quote. While single AI agents can handle specific tasks, the real power comes when specialized agents collaborate to solve complex problems.

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Barron's has this piece titled, Google search is fading. The whole internet is at risk. Barron's has a... Pretty tough paywall, but the link I'm sharing should open for you in your stocks app if you're on iOS or Mac, maybe. Some of the stuff in this article we already know. Stuff like this, quote. Roughly one in five visits to the world's top internet sites begin on search engines, according to data from analytics firm SEMrush.

At Wikipedia, search generates 63% of global visits. For travel site TripAdvisor, it's 58%. For local review site Yelp, it's 51%. But internet search traffic has been falling for much of the past year as web surfers experiment with artificial intelligence-powered search from OpenAI's ChatGPT and AI startup PerplexityAI. So far, referrals from AI search engines have replaced about 10%.

percent of the traditional search losses, according to similar web data. Across the web economy, the trend is clear. Search is drying up, and Google is no longer the clear-cut way to drive audiences to websites. The changes have begun to force a reckoning across various industries.

Late last month, Business Insider, a leading digital news publication, cut 21% of its staff, citing traffic drops that were, quote, outside of its control. Business models are under pressure, distribution is unstable, and competition for attention is fiercer than ever. CIDR CEO Barbara Peng wrote to employees, end quote. But some of this is a bit new, quote.

Last month, search referrals to top U.S. travel and tourism sites tumbled 20% year over year, according to the latest data from SimilarWeb. E-commerce companies saw their referrals fall 9%. For news and media sites, search traffic dropped 17%. The finance, lifestyle, and food and drink category all saw similar types of declines in the month. In May, monthly U.S. search traffic to Schwab.com fell for the first time in at least two years, according to SimilarWeb, down 14% a year ago.

Search referrals to Schwab were up 179%. TripAdvisor's search tumbled 34% on the month, while Starbucks saw a 41% decline to its website. Search to Netflix, a pioneer in digital strategies, was down 23%, end quote. Now, of course, this ties into what Google is doing, too. Google is trying to ride the fence, right? Replace search with AI. Quote,

A year ago, it launched so-called AI overviews atop Google search results, promising condensed AI-generated answers to search queries. Those overviews, which initially appeared on a small number of searches, have been appearing more frequently. Ahrefs said that the prevalence of AI overviews have more than doubled from March 12th to May 6th.

The AI summaries have spurred debate across the internet, with publishers worried about a search query that delivers answers in a few paragraphs with no need to click for more info. According to similar web data from March, searches with AI overviews resulted in a click 23% of the time. For searches without the overviews, the click rate was 36%.

Looking at search results that do show an AI answer, comparing that with search results that do not show an answer, we found a crazy drop-off, said Kevin Indig, a search engine optimization or SEO consultant. and author of the Growth Memo blog. This is a click killer, end quote. So here's the point that I want to make. Last week, I animated that I thought something interesting might be going on behind the scenes at Google.

potential layoffs in their key search teams. Google is in the classic innovators dilemma situation, right? Search is their cash cow, but search is being supplanted by AI. but they are a key provider of AI. How much can they ride two horses without killing both? Here's what I'm saying. I think they're actively riding this. I think the inflection point for them is now.

They will be willing to ride the slow decline of Search while also potentially killing Search and the web, hopefully for them, by birthing the replacement. Quoting again, In April, during Google's earnings call, an analyst asked company executives about the impact that AI overviews was having on click-through rates.

I don't think this is the moment to go into the details of click-through rates and conversion and so on, said Philip Schindler, Google's chief business officer. But overall, we're happy with what we're seeing, end quote. Think of the timing of this for Google. Their cloud division is now giant. YouTube is now giant. Maybe Waymo will be the future of transportation soon. In five years, ten years, will Google need search?

They won't kill it. It will be like, you know, how linear TV and cable channels for conglomerates are a cash cow that they milk while slowly imagining euthanizing the cow. And then... There's the whole antitrust thing. Google might have to divest major components of their search monopoly. But what if the timing of this is good for Google? The government forces them to divest these increasingly legacy businesses?

But that's the Google angle. What about the angle for the web overall? Quoting the piece again. Going forward, investors should pay attention to a company's search exposure. Across the category, certain brands are far less dependent on Google's referrals. Airbnb, for instance, got 14% of referrals from search in March versus 58% for the travel firm.

TripAdvisor, according to SEMrush. DoorDash and Uber were 13%. Social media apps like Pinterest and meta platforms Instagram also tend to be far less search-dependent than much of the internet. Their sites drew 23% and 17% of referrals from search, respectively. In May, Pinterest's CEO told investors that 85% of users come directly to the company's mobile app, end quote.

Like going forward, the web will still be a destination for commerce. You go to websites to buy things and maybe still entertainment on the margins, maybe social stuff on the margins, though. Those are largely walled gardens, except for things like Reddit, though Reddit, of course, is cutting deals with AI companies and isn't sort of Discord where Reddit should be going through a certain lens.

For over 30 years, the web functioned as a type of compute. The grand project of the web was to put all of humanity's knowledge and day-to-day activity online, digitize it, and search was functionally the command line. to use it. The web was a type of compute. It was a question and answer machine. The compute action was, to quote that old Pete Holmes joke, where was Tom Pettyborn? Here's your answer. Does the rash on my arm mean I touched poison ivy? Here's your answer.

I don't think there's any way to look at the way things are going and not see that AI replaces that question and answer function of the web. Google knows that. Google will still be a question and answer service, but divorced from the web, I think. Search will essentially give up the charade and just be a pure commerce advertising engine.

Google is leaving the web behind. AI is leaving the web behind. Users are leaving the web behind for the question and answer function because AI serves that need now. What does that do to the web? What does that do to news sites and entertainment sites and all that stuff? I don't know. The web largely killed the news and certain types of media, and now the web itself is being killed. Where does media go?

I don't know where this ends up, but I feel like I know where it is going. The web as we know it is at an inflection point, and that inflection point is right now. Search made the web functional. Search is leaving the web behind. Without search as almost the OS, the command line of the web, what is the web's function?

I'm just saying this is happening right now. Whatever the web is in five or ten years, we will look back at this time, this year, as when it all started to change. Google knows this. Keep your eye on what Google is doing. They're sort of leading the charge. Buckle up. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.