Website/Hosting

I read this “Stephen Follows” article today (“What Happened to TheNumbers.com“); it discusses how a 30 year old movie information website was forced offline this year due to excessive AI traffic and suspected AI hacking.
It’s interesting to read how AI is generating more and more traffic to websites but at the same time providing less viewers to see the content (and of course to see adverts etc). Not surprising given how people now use AI not search engines to answer their questions, but it is clearly not sustainable (there’s no reason for people to provide websites any more if they make zero money from them).

My own website www.margaretandian.com (which includes www.gbmini.net) has been around more than 20 years and generates no income (no adverts) it just exists … while I do post occasionally, very few visitors are looking at current content – most visits go to many year old GBMINI posts! I wondered if the AI effect would show on my site and the answer is pretty clearly “yes”.

My site generally has VERY few visitors (less than 2000 per month) with a very occasional spike – but this year visits are already a lot higher than all recent years and we are only partway through the year:

On a monthly basis the last four months have more than double the typical visit count and this month only half done is going to be high also:

My content is no more interesting than before (there’s almost never GBMINI updates) so the only sensible explanation is AI doing visits, to answer AI queries that people have. Unlike traditional web searching, AI has no memory of what it finds so a similar query causes another website visit. I have to think that AI could cache data, but instead repeated visits moving their costs to the websites, with zero contribution for the information found. It doesn’t matter for me but I’m sure it will matter for many others!

I’ve now completed the first phase of a huge website move – I’m transferring both my websites (GBMINI and MargaretAndIan) to a single blog, hosted on WordPress.com!

Combined MargaretAndIan and GBMINI hosting

There’s a few reasons for this – but the primary two are (a) that the gallery format is much nicer with Jetpack which is included, and (b) that it’s often hard to decide whether a post belongs to GBMINI or M&I. In the past I’ve sometimes split a post in two, describing car-related things on GBMINI and trip-related on M&I; I won’t have to do that any more.

Once the transfer is complete, I’ll also be paying less and (I believe) having a more reliable service behind the website.

Today, I’ve completed the transfer of EVERY post from GBMINI over to this new site; while doing that, I’ve tidied up all the posts and made the image displays nicer, and I’ve deleted a few – those that were primarily about some other website that no longer exists, for example.

The next phase is to move all my M&I posts over and do the same tidying up – this is going to take a while yet (especially year 2009 with it’s “post every day”!); but I’m very pleased with the overall results so for me it’s worth doing.

I’ve also moved GPMINI over to it’s own WordPress.com hosting, here, for now; that site really needed work as it’s gallery has been broken for a few years! I will be losing the old GP owners forum when I complete that move, but it’s rarely active so an acceptable loss.