About fifteen years ago, back when I thought I wanted to be a web designer, there was a weird trend going on in building websites. I was particularly interested in the area of accessibility. By design, the most basic HTML websites are very accessible; assistive technology made it easy for things like screen readers to just read the text to you (very useful if you have poor eyesight, or other conditions that can make websites hard to use), but 'the internet' as a medium was still transitioning from a platform for sharing 'information' to something more focussed on aesthetics.

A simple example - you can write some text and use HTML to define it as a header, and the web browser will then render that text differently (ie. larger, in bold, maybe in a different typeface to the body text). A header also has different semantic meaning - so, a screen reader will use things like pauses to add emphasis to it.

So far so good. But there was a little problem; if you wanted a particular design to your headers, you could just use HTML and CSS to define it - but it wouldn't look exactly the same on all computers (depending on things like what browser it was viewed in, what operating system it was running, what fonts were installed and so on). So, one alternative was to just drop the text altogether and put a picture of the text up instead.

"Aha", you might be thinking. "But that would break all of that assistive technology and ruin the website's accessibility, wouldn't it?"

Yes, it would. But there was a far more important ¹ blind website visitor than any of those people; Google. Today, Google would probably just use some sort of OCR technology to figure out the words in the image - but back then (and probably still today, given that its an $80 billion industry) it was really important to make your websites easy for Google to read and index. I don't know how accurate that $80 billion number is, but I'm very confident that the amount being spent on making websites accessible is a far, far smaller figure.

Meanwhile, the economics around the internet were changing. Businesses with websites had already generally turned their focus from 'web as a sales channel' (ie. an online version of an offline catalogue) to 'web as a marketing channel' (ie. an online version of an offline brochure), and web designers - who used to be 'computery people who had strong feelings about Microsoft' - were increasingly becoming 'graphic designery people who had strong feelings about Adobe'.

Looking back now, I think this was probably a part of a bigger transition. I mentioned before that 'the internet' was transitioning from a platform for sharing 'information' to something more focussed on aesthetics; in hindsight, I would say it was about "content". Broadly speaking, you've got two types of websites; ones used by businesses as part of their business' sales channel, and ones used by businesses as their business - which is generally driven by advertising. ¹ Advertising relies on having an audience, which in turn relies on having 'content' for them to consume to fill in the space around the ads.

In my own life/career, I was going through a related transition - from thinking that I wanted to be a web designer¹ to thinking that I wanted to be... something else. I knew that advertising was going to be core to the economics of the web, I didn't really understand how it worked (beyond the pretty basic insight that the whole point of television programmes on commercial channels - as far as the business was concerned - was to attract the audiences that they could sell to advertisers), so landed a job in the Research team in a media agency to try and figure it out. Thirteen years on, and I'm still trying to figure it out... What I quickly learnt was that advertising on the internet doesn't really care about 'information' - it just cares about the person looking at the web page.

And just as television channels only pay people to make television programmes so that they can sell adverts, websites only pay people to make 'content' so that they can sell adverts.. Or at least, they used to - obviously, if you can fill your website with content that people create and give you for free, or make your website a necessary step on the journey of people getting to the website they actually want to look at then you've got a business model that could crush those who are paying people to make content.

But when your website is a marketing channel, you need to plug it into your advertising. That means collecting data from your visitors that you can match up with data from other websites' visitors- because unlike 'traditional media' where value was measured in terms of people, the value of internet advertising is measured in terms of IDs, or the models of people - along with all the associated data used to decide which particular advert can be served to them for the most money.

And thats really the whole (commercial) point of most websites - not to share information with people, but to communicate with the advertising robots that deal with the IDs that are attached to them. Which is why a typical website experience today doesn't really look like anything that has been designed around the 'user experience' - instead, it looks like this.

(Key quote- "because then you might do it".)

The value of "content" isn't really measured based on its entertainment value, or usefulness, or truthfulness, or its place in a functioning democracy with an educated and informed electorate. Its not even judged based on the audience that it attracts any more, because 'an audience' can't really be monetised the way it can in print or on TV. Its mainly judged on the data that can be collected in the process of its consumption. And if that means content created through a process of machine learning - that is, robots consuming the content so they can recycle it through GAN networks to create more content, to be consumed and categorised by other machine learning processes to figure out which content to serve up to which IDs to generate the most value through associated ad exposure, then who really cares about the eyeballs (or other assistive technology) and associated sacks of meat that get caught up along the way?

You might have guessed from the embedded YouTube videos, but I recently discovered Stevie Martin's YouTube channel. Strongly recommended.

Hopefully it goes without saying, but just to be clear - "important" here is not by my own value judgement. ↩
I had strong feelings about Microsoft and Adobe... ↩
Yes, this is clearly a massive over-generalisation. This website- for example- isn't really either. But then, I work in advertising and for want of a better term, this website is part of my 'personal brand'. Its just that it costs me money to run and is not effectively monetised. Which I guess isn't that different to a lot of web-based businesses of the late 90s/early 2000s - except they had more successful business models. ↩

Some Random Nerd