Here’s What Alloy Is Doing, By The way.
The internet—the repository of all human knowledge, the greatest advancement in communication since language itself—sucks.
It’s hard to use, sloppy, disorganized, and broken. Most everything feels like either the product of minimal effort, or a scam. This is a structural problem.
It does not have to be like this. I can promise you it can’t go on forever.
Here’s a story I tell when I’m explaining Alloy: Last summer, I was boarding a plane while reading a longish profile of a center-left talk show host on the website of a flagship men’s magazine. The story was really well-written, the photos were great–but as I got to my seat, where my 5G connection had to fight its way through the skin of the airplane, a Wal-Mart ad appeared over a whole paragraph of text. I looked for a way to dismiss the little opaque box and gave up. I refreshed the site and waited for everything to reload and started reading, until the Wal-Mart ad reappeared. Then refreshed, then waited. I did this four or five more times before I got to the end of the story. The human writers and editors who created the piece kept me engaged enough to fight through the actual experience of trying to read it, which is harder and more impressive than anything I saw happen at the Winter Olympics.
It was a relatively minor annoyance, but increasingly, the experience of using the internet is a series of minor and major annoyances. The cumulative effect is maddening and degrading. These experiences are a symptom of a system that is eating itself.
Alloy is an attempt to provide an alternative.
Almost every editorial property (site where journalists post news or writers posts stories/commentary vs. sites where people buy things) gets most of its revenue by running display ads, the little square guys. In the old days, this worked on a magazine model where someone from the website would call a marketer and say “we attracted this many people to the site, here’s who we think they are, and here’s what it’ll cost you to put a picture of your product on there where they can see it.” They’d work out a deal and you’d see a little picture of a Honda on the site and the marketer could go to their boss and say “2 million people saw a picture of a Honda.”
Some sites still do this, and some marketers do still transact directly with certain sites. But, over the last 20 years or so, this arrangement has come to be the exception. Most of the ads you see today are programmatic ads, which to put it as succinctly as possible means that marketers contract with an agency, who then buys ad space at auction based on demographic and tracking data.
So, a car company could say “We have a new small crossover aimed at budget-conscious zillenials who live in an urban area, love the outdoors, own a pet and make around $80k a year. Let’s target the ones who have been shopping for cars online.” Then the agency will enter that information into a third-party automated exchange who then distributes the ads to various websites automatically, prioritizing the buyers who paid the most for them. Rampant fraud means that a lot of the impressions that marketers pay for aren’t real, but the attitude seems to be that programmatic is so boring and low-value that marketers can’t bring themselves to care most of the time.
I’ve never talked to a marketer who believes these ads are really effective and I’ve never talked to a person who will admit to having clicked one on purpose. Most of the time they’re advertising sales or offers and most of the time they’re ignored, viewed by bots or they’re never viewed at all because people have, out of frustration with a particularly intrusive ad experience, downloaded an ad-blocker.
Targeting has gotten better, the ability to track users through the process of clicking an ad is better, but the most charitable way I’ve heard programmatic advertising described in the last few years is that it “has its place” and “will remain a part of the mix.”
All that said, I would never presume to tell a marketer how to spend their budget. There’s a lot of institutional inertia behind this stuff and it would take some courage to change course when the numbers on a cost-per-eyeball basis are still defensible. Fair enough.
This model, unfortunately, has caused some problems.
For publishers, the logic was initially that a huge audience made them attractive to marketers who would buy ads directly from them. Audience scale might also be attractive to investors, who would provide money to build even bigger audiences. This did not end up panning out.
But, even after the “pivot to video” era, and even after most ad activity went to programmatic or to social media companies, the idea that audience size would correlate to revenue persisted. And, the cost of growing audiences went up. The quality of the actual product publishers were offering declined and the user experience got more annoying.
Billion dollar publishing startups started changing hands for smaller and smaller amounts of money. I think you’d be shocked to know how little some of these sites are going for. I certainly have been.
Meanwhile, nobody put any real effort into exploring why their model doesn’t work when it comes to actually helping marketers do their jobs.
Some publishers have been able to slow the bleeding with subscriptions, branded content, lead gen, events or affiliate programs, but almost all of them have seen massive layoffs and cost-cutting that have diminished their ability to deliver the information and accountability that as it turns out, was one of the things keeping American society from spinning itself apart.
Understaffed newsrooms have to make harder decisions about what gets covered and what doesn’t. As financial pressure mounts, the important stories that higher value readers want, and that inform our shared reality, get pushed to the back burner in favor of lowest-common denominator, optimized stuff that generates traffic. The model that distributes the money that, for the most part keeps the media properties alive, doesn’t know the difference. There are people in the chain who can add or remove sites from their buy lists, and that is happening in a lot of cases, but the process is too automated.
There’s nothing wrong with SEO bait, there was nothing wrong with “Which Harry Potter House Do You Belong In?” quizzes. They’re infinitely consumable. But for marketers, the problem is that they’re only going to bring you a certain audience and it’s not necessarily the one you care about talking to.
Right now, you can still build a decent sized audience by framing stories in an overly negative or sensational way. You can still game search engines or the goofy “AI” results Google is degrading themselves and their users with. I’ve done it. You can still get traffic posting crash videos and ragebait. It may not help readers understand the world, it may be degrading for everyone involved, and it may be of little use to marketers, but if the goal is just to deliver any kind of impression, it more or less works.
Will readers form a trusting, long-term relationship with a publisher over this stuff? Do marketers want their ads sitting next to it?
There are counter-examples in publishers who are managing to navigate these conflicting incentives, my old colleagues at Gizmodo come to mind most immediately. Others have had success parlaying their big audiences into viable membership models. There are causes for hope.
But for the most part, a lot of publishers have arrived at the logical endpoint where they try to achieve a perfect balance between cost to attain an audience and revenue they can automatically generate just from having an audience of a certain size. The audience may shrink over time, but you can just cut costs to stay ahead of that revenue number then either shut the site down or sell it.
This experiment is currently being run in real time on a number of different car sites. If you’re just collecting programmatic advertising, you don’t really need a staff of credible reporters and editors. AI is getting “good,” and only about half of American adults can read above a sixth grade level anyway. The process is further along on social media where “creators” are absolutely shoveling AI slop into the machine. Did you know that General Motors is bringing back Pontiac and Toyota is going to sell the Hilux here? YouTube viewers know it.
No publisher has a right to ad revenue of course, and no company has a right to stay in business. Conditions change, publishing is hard.
Again, the problem for marketers, beyond all the hippy-dippy “it was good when there was an objective reality” and downstream of that, “we need an economy so people can buy our products” stuff, is that the people that publishers and marketers say they need to reach are checked out, scattered and exhausted by the energy needed to sift through garbage. Who can they trust? Who can marketers trust?
Which leads me to the elephant in the room, the big vacuum that has sucked up all the ad revenue and readers that used to underpin America’s vaunted Fourth Estate: social media.
It’s true that rather than spend time on “destination websites,” a lot of people are scrolling social media. Alloy posts stuff on a couple of platforms precisely because we know that’s where our potential readers are. I believe though that the best and most valuable of those readers are saveable, they are ready for something else. I know that even if they’re on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok today, that’s not where they want to be, that’s not where they aspire to be, and that’s definitely not where they want their kids to be.
Social platforms and tech products more broadly are making you, your children and grandchildren, dumber and sicker. They are rewiring human brains. They spy on you in ways that go way beyond trying to help you find things to buy. Meta is literally collecting nudes without consent and sending them to an office to be catalogued by human workers to train their AI models. At the Mark Zuckerberg level of decision making, his companies are making horrifying decsions that impact real kids. This is, after all, a guy who got his start with a website that ranked women on their appearances. There’s no reason for a user or a parent to trust these utter degenerates. Why on earth with a marketer trust them?
Personally, I would sooner hand my kids cartons of unfiltered cigarettes than let them spend a minute alone with a Mark Zuckerberg product. At least smoking makes you look cool while you’re doing it.
X (the everything app) is a husk, Facebook is more or less stagnant. Go look at those sites critically, they’re a wasteland. Other tech companies have a case of the rot, too. Google can’t even manage to do search anymore. AI is just starting to figure out the precise way it’ll flame out, taking a big chunk of the economy with it. Looking into my crystal ball, my guess is that absent the relentless hype and pressure to find some use case for LLMs, actual people will not pay to use a product that degrades their brain function. This especially the case then you factor in that the products do not work and have been shown to reduce productivity. It’s a scam, which is good because if it wasn’t and everything worked out the way the AI boosters want it to–the best case scenario is that it destroys the economy.
As it dawns on people that these companies are providing bad products that harm them, they’ll quit. It’ll probably take a while, and some of these companies will never really go away, but the big tech companies don’t have the juice anymore. They do have ad fraud, at least.
There’s a tendency among professionals a generation or more ahead of me to see what tech does as permanent and inevitable. The internet hit during their adulthood and it really did change everything. Since then, you have to admit that it’s been relatively easy to get people on board with some very goofy projects. Remember when you were going to get left behind if you didn’t have a space in the metaverse? Remember when companies were paying to have their products represented in an NFT? (This was not very long ago.)
American tech is out of ideas. It hasn’t delivered anything remotely useful in a very long time. They’re a spent force and they know it. That’s why they’re now engaged in the proud American tradition of getting way too obsessed with dumb, culty ideas that no normal person would take seriously for even a second.
There are a million examples of companies getting so confident in their market share that they start making bad products. Even their most loyal customers eventually quit using them.
People who grew up with a bunch of tech platforms that are now dead and forgotten know basically how this stuff works and understand that a lot of these ideas are transparently stupid and embarrassing. Several of them are fun but have no real way to make money. We went to school with people who are now in tech and can tell you firsthand that a lot of them are bozos. Even with all the free money and freedom to operate you could ever ask for, most of the stuff they come up with fails in ways that are obvious when you think about them for a second. Their products and services are just like anything else, ephemeral.
A lot of people used to be addicted to smoking, but as it became clear that it was really bad for you, it declined in popularity. It’s not a stretch to say that the stuff these companies make is worse for you than smoking and the word is getting out.
The social media companies have abandoned their original (and appealing) value proposition, offering a means by which people can stay in touch. They’re now disorganized and decentralized media companies who want you to produce their product (content) for them at your own expense, then use that content to stalk you and everyone else. Their actual products are getting harder and more confusing to use. Social media was a fun distraction, now it’s something that any person would tell you they want to spend less time on.
The hardware companies ship junk products that don’t work on the promise they’ll fix them with updates. They’ve got you so over a barrel that you just accept the negative health effects and planned obsolescence.
The AI companies are much worse off. As we learn that their products degrade human brain function (to say nothing of their other costs) they still haven’t landed on a use case, and even if they found one tomorrow the numbers just don’t work. How do you recoup a trillion dollar investment? With ads?
If you’re a marketer looking to reach qualified buyers for your cars, do you want to do it via products and services that are harming them? Would you pay for ad space on the aforementioned carton of cigarettes? Do you want the machine that tells teenagers to kill themselves suggesting the best small crossover? Is that brand safe?
This is me officially acknowledging that I’ve entered into rant territory. But my point is, that as hard as it may be to believe from right here in 2026, the future does not belong to the people who are currently working hard to make your life worse and to degrade you. The unraveling is underway.
I can still remember when the internet was “disrupting” print media. The tech people loved to trot out the analogy of buggy whip makers losing their livelihoods when cars came into fashion. They weren’t thinking that it would come for them too, but it will.
The people marketers say they want to reach don’t aspire to be fed commodified content slop. They don’t want to watch their cognitive capacity diminish. They want their kids to be healthy and safe. Attitudes are shifting, evidence is mounting—this stuff is well into the “getting wrapped up” phase, which is why everything feels so desperate and the bunker-building guys in charge look so pathetic and thirsty. They feel it. You probably do, too. The social media era is ending and it’ll take a lot of the American tech industry with it. Everyone will be better off after a reset.
I don’t know that people will head back to “destination websites” in droves or go to some other new thing. But my bet is that the best publishers will maintain high quality, engaged audiences and that those audiences will be very valuable to marketers who want to reach them in ways that aren’t so annoying and invasive that they’re counterproductive.
If you’re still reading this, you’ve probably figured out that with Alloy, we’re aiming to at least make a start at solving the problems above. This isn’t me asking anyone to support the ecosystem of content creation or journalism, though I do personally find that argument persuasive. Alloy does ask marketers and readers to act purely in their own self interest by supporting a better reader experience and what we believe will be a more effective marketing platform. None of us can afford to let the internet continue its descent into uselessness.
I’ve gone on for a long time, so here’s the simple version of the plan:
1. Build a cool site that feels good and provides tangible value to the people who use it. This can mean entertainment/useful information, but it should also include things that happen in real life, away from the internet. Readers should want to become members and supporters. (We are very early in this stage.)
2. Produce great creative work that solves a problem for partners.
3. Expand membership/merch/events business to foster deep, meaningful connections that benefit members and partners in a tangible way. I won’t get into detail here, but we need to go deeper than display advertising and lead gen.
I don’t think there’s a near-term future for publishers in programmatic ads. I don’t think there’s a long-term future in spending our money creating content for surveillance-driven tech companies.
I do think that interest in cars, the car business, and car culture has never been bigger. The audience is there, but for the most part, publishers and tech companies are failing to engage them in a way that is useful to marketers. There are a lot of ways to do better for everyone involved but under the current system, everything is misaligned.
We may be early to this, but we’re right.
Recent Posts
All Posts
March 6, 2026
March 6, 2026
March 5, 2026