Opinion The universe ended unexpectedly on a March Monday in 2025. To the relief of many, it came back a few days later much as before, but with one very significant change. One that may herald significant changes for all of us, inside its sphere or not.
This universe, in particular, is Universe Today, a space news website a good quarter-century old published by Fraser Cain. Over that time, it has sprouted podcasts and a YouTube channel with nearly half a million subscribers. It has a team of expert writers and production staff, runs interviews with actual researchers about all manner of space science and events, and is highly regarded. In short, it's doing the sort of science journalism that seems most under threat in today's turgid political and anti-factual times. It is a very good thing.
Or it was until a couple of Mondays ago, when the website, still the hub of the enterprise, went down and would not come up. There were backups. They did not work. There were secondary backups. Those neither. The only option was to rebuild the site from scratch and repopulate it from the content database and the image files hosted on the web server. As [Cain recounts](https://youtu.be/H0uKlAHcUGk?si=qJpEb-X0HXnPCs1r), this took a string of 16-hour days. The site ran on WordPress with the usual commercial trimmings to support advertisers and sponsors, because Universe Today has depended on the website advertising revenue for its entire existence.
But during the long slog to get the site up again, Cain realized that this was not the way the universe should evolve. Over the past four years or so, advertising revenue had shrunk by about 90 percent. Some of the gap had been picked up by the very lightly monetized YouTube videos, but of late the Patreon model had done most of the work. With no sign that the trends would change, quite the reverse, what if Universe Today just walked away from advertising on its main site?
Out went WordPress. In came pure static pages. Out went all the tracking and cookies. In came ... nothing. From a technical aspect, the new site was a tremendous success, with pages served in single-digit milliseconds instead of the many hundreds needed previously. The site codebase was a tenth of the size of the old installation. As for user experience, all they got was pure content delivered nearly instantaneously. You can see for yourself. It's a simple site anyway that does the job of serving space news. It doesn't even have search, but use of site:universetoday.com as part of a Google search term does the job just fine. At least Google is still good for something.
It's also good for choking the last remaining life from ad revenue supported sites. Its AI, and that of others, is being wired to promote, sometimes exclusively present, summaries of content instead of links to it, meaning content generators get no traffic and no advertising cash at all. At the same time, AI slop is being poured into cyberspace with the enthusiasm of a thousand supernovae. Near-nonsense written by LLMs asked to replicate the form of content most appetizing to search already soaks up many of the clicks that get through the AI-generated summary at the top of the page. Soon it will soak up more.
At this point, adtech can be considered malware. It loads the user with hard-to-manage tracking, sucks resources it doesn't pay for from users and providers alike, and presents huge bundles of JavaScript doing who knows what. Imagine if you were caught doing this? The argument that ad revenue is necessary to fund services falls flat when you look at the surviving providers who benefit most, and those for whom it barely suffices.
Can Patreon and others like it really replace the adtech behemoths? Won't people's love of free content and lack of loyalty result in thousands of freeloaders for every paying customer? To some extent, that doesn't matter even if it's true as the same economics of electronic distribution work as well for a publisher as for spammers. Good engineering that understands the readership's motivations and composition is essential, but in-depth understanding of, respect for, and empathy with the readership is needed for success whatever your business model. Plus, if your product is undeniably superior, more secure, and gives a better experience, that's a lot of attributes to build a brand that can survive in a hostile environment.
That's the flip side of the equation. Publishers talk of existential crises as what little ad revenue they can muster keeps soaking into the sand. But the adtech-driven environment faces its own existential crisis, one where it no longer fulfills even the lowest levels of acceptable experiences for those it can't automate away – the users. Us. The ones who curse after ten useless links, or demands for money from sites that will still throw ad chicanery at us even if we cough up. You can't keep dumping toxins into the environment and expect your food chain to carry on regardless.
How well Universe Today will prosper without ads remains unanswered, and even if it does then that's just one data point. Patreon and the model behind it aren't perfect. It can work very well case by case but there's no sense of ensuring a consistently better experience. That's up to the content providers who use it. As the ad-supported world degenerates like a dying cuttlefish, though, a way of marking oneself as a member of a mutual quality club would be the beginning of a new ecosystem that could thrive on the ashes of the old. That this will happen one day is guaranteed. The universe is like that. ®