If you’re a regular visitor to Universe Today, you’ve probably noticed that the website looks dramatically different. Simpler, cleaner, without all those pesky intrusive ads. We’re in a new era, now. Here’s what happened, why I decided to remove the ads from the site, and what you can expect going forward.
What Happened?
Last Monday, I discovered that the website had crashed, and the webserver had gone offline. Despite my best attempts to troubleshoot the problem and get it back online, I couldn’t get it working. I called our webmaster, who helped me troubleshoot the problem, and he couldn’t figure it out either. I’m sure we would have eventually gotten there, but we figured the best solution was to just restore the entire site from our primary backup (I know, I know, test your backups, everyone.)
Unfortunately, the configuration issue in the live server was also in all the incremental backups for the last month. I’ve got a secondary backup method that we could have used, but we decided to restore the site from the live database, rebuilding it on a brand new web server. It’s fine; I’ve done this kind of thing before.
But as I was preparing to rebuild the WordPress database, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hated how the site looked. It was ugly, and filled with ads. I would get emails almost every day from readers who complained about how intrusive and ugly the ads were. But that’s what pays the bills: no ads, no payments to the writers, no Universe Today.
But I did the math and figured there might be another way.
The Decline of Search Engines and Advertising
Universe Today has been supported by advertising for almost its entire history, starting in 2003, if I recall. The Google Adsense ads were simple to run and reasonably targeted, and they paid enough money to keep the site operational, hire freelance writers, pay our server costs, and even take a salary. Three years ago, 90% of Universe Today’s revenue came from web advertising, so although they detracted from the site’s design, they were necessary to keep the whole operation going.
But something shifted over the last couple of years. Anyone who runs a web-based business knows exactly what I’m talking about. Four trends came together at the same time:
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Social media stopped linking to websites. I know, you can technically put links on Facebook and X, but they want you to stay in their walled garden. Links were getting buried. Fine, that was a trap anyway.
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AI content on search engines. You know how you search for things on Google and see that AI-generated information at the top of the page? That dropped the amount of search traffic coming to Universe Today precipitously. Also fine. Search engine traffic has always been a bonus; it is nothing that anyone should organize their business around.
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The rise of AI-generated content. You can spin up a website with thousands of articles in a heartbeat with AI, which is mostly indistinguishable from actual news and information. The search engines will display it, and it takes away from other sources of human-generated content. That’s unfortunate, and I’m sure Google is doing its very best to clear it out of the index, but it seems like an intractable problem. Obviously, it’s just going to get better over time, and could very well be the best source of content eventually. But it’s not there today.
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Bottomless ad inventory. With countless web pages popping up, indistinguishable from human-written articles, advertisers have unlimited places to put their ads, driving ad prices into the basement.
The result of all this is that ad revenue on Universe Today has dropped to about 10-20% of what we were making just a couple of years ago.
So Let’s Remove the Ads
As I was rebuilding my website on a new server and preparing to recreate the same site, a voice in my head said, “But do you have to?” This decline in ad revenue happened slowly, and I could see the writing on the wall. About three years ago, I doubled down on getting our content directly funded by patrons. People who appreciated our journalism and wanted to support our ongoing operations. This allowed us to send out our weekly email newsletter to 70,000 people with no ads, maintain a podcast that releases new episodes almost every day with no ads, and run the absolute minimum number of ads in our YouTube videos.
In those three years, I could almost close the revenue gap. However, the one final place with ads was this website. The one you’re looking at right now.
So, I decided to take a leap of faith. The patrons got us almost all the way there, so let’s remove the ads from the website and go for it. Not only that, but let’s remove the cookies, tracking scripts, and every scrap of Javascript from the site—just pure text and images.
And here we are. Thanks to more than 3,000 people who individually support our work, I’m able to keep a team of veteran science journalists, video editors, and podcast producers employed. I can pay for the ongoing server expenses, and even draw a salary for myself.
In a time when the online media landscape feels more uncertain than it’s ever been, we’re solid as a rock. We’re doing some of the best space journalism in the 26 years I’ve run this company. We have a clean, ad-free website that any teacher would proudly show in the classroom. All of our content is released under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. And as more patrons come on board, we’ll serve as a safe harbor for science journalists who want to continue the craft.
Obviously, if you want to join this amazing community, we’ll be glad to have you.
The best is yet to come.