I’m kind of conflicted about this. On one hand it’s dangerous that the public’s access to information is so tightly coupled to a single organizations decisions, and I can see the danger in Google making a change like this.
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful to actually finding information, and if a site like Kotakus traffic is down by 60% as a result—is that due to Google being dangerous, or Kotaku having a pile of garbage content meant to game the system and bring in traffic?
For what it’s worth I’m using Kotaku as an example because the article used Kotaku as an example—I have no actual opinion or evidence around the actual content on that particular site.
That was kind of my thought too. These people were offering a subscription based service that people were paying for. This shows pretty conclusively that people are willing to pay for content when it is conveniently packaged. When it’s broken apart and fragmented, piracy and alternative consumption method become more appealing.
Could you imagine if the music industry operated in the same way? Instead of choosing whether to use Spotify, Apple Music, etc, you needed to have both just to consume a relatively small collection of popular music? That would be madness—and it’s madness for film and television content as well.