[Use your best hushed golf announcer voice and pretend you’re Marlin Perkins who hosted Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985.]
“We see the oxpecker, long-thought to be a helpful parasite on the butt of a sub-Saharan rhinoceros. In fact, it turns out that the yellow- or red-beaked avian may be doing as much harm as good to its host. Just like swatting its tail to protect its backside, a policy from Mutual of Omaha can protect your family…”
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People thought oxpeckers were an example of mutualism. Not so fast. While they do eat bugs, they also eat the rhinos and zebras and giraffes they sit on. They’re complex parasites.
We’d all love to believe an aggregator is an example of mutualism, but let’s be honest, give them enough time and they’re parasitic. Google feeds off content creators, sells ads, and paying nothing or next-to-nothing for the folks who made the content.
It’s fine to be parasitic for a while. In fact, it’s fine for a long while. It’s fine until you reach a point where the parasitic aggregator has taken so much from the host community that the community dies. The problem for parasites is that they don’t create anything. They die too.
Google doesn’t produce the content or foster users to create the content which it desperately needs to keep its parasitic search engine and even more parasitic AI running.
The other day, in Did you read that Google’s AI is racist? I wrote that Google should buy Reddit. For the content. Somewhat inadvertently, I’ve flanked this topic from a second direction recently. In Is Google becoming mortal?, I wrote that Google should buy Reddit. For the content.
I was so in the matted down in fur looking for food, I didn’t see the African Forest Buffalo for the tree-born ticks. This phenomenon found in nature needs a name. I’m going to dub it The Curator’s Conundrum. Nah. The Freeloader’s Lemma. Hmm. No. The Bloodsucker’s Consquence. The Usurper’s Upshot? Got it… The Aggregator’s Dilemma.
The Aggregator’s Dilemma is a game theory thought experiment that I just thought up to elucidate a paradox and demonstrate how engorging its profits while marginalizing the economic viability of its host, at scale, can have a self-defeating outcome on a parasitic corporate strategy. There. That’s an official sounding title. Now someone can write a paper on it.
Google is something between an example of mutualism and being a simple parasite. Move over, Google. There’s another, newer parasite on the horizon. And its name is Perplexity. Google is an oxpecker. Perplexity is perfectly parasitic.
Perexplity is the AI-powered search engine and the talk of San Fran’s AI circles. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, sat down to chat with Kevin Roose on Hard Fork. At around the 18-minute mark, Kevin explained, beautifully, that Google gets people to go to publisher sites (more ish than really but let’s hold the quibbles for later). That’s how people see ads (again, later). That’s how publishers make money (sure, let’s go with that). Kevin asked Aravind if publishers should be worried about Perplexity.
My take, YES. In all caps. Publishers should be terrified. Perplexity exists to feed off you.
Aravind said, “No.” Because, Perplexity can make its audience more aware of the publisher’s brand.
Awareness, of course, is worth the square root of the natural log of the number of Reddit daily average users divided by the reciprocal of those who ask Perplexity about porn times zero. Ignoring the BEDMAS rules you forgot in middle school, publishers can’t make a plug nickel with Perplexity. Publishers who let Perplexity take their content may as well walk into a Vegas casino and just hand a pit boss their pre-paid Platinum AMEX. At least they’ll get loyalty points for that one-way Greyhound trip to Palookasville.
Here’s the thing about the Aggregator’s Dilemma. Google, along with Meta and other aggregators, has already weakened and thinned the herd. Perplexity isn’t feeding off fatty media mammals of the 1990s. It’s trying to feast off the scrawny carcasses scrouging for food. There’s very little to pick from so Perplexity doesn’t have as long to be parasitic before it finds its own self-defeating outcome. And, unlike Google, it doesn’t have piles of cash to cushion the blow. It’s going to be interesting to see how long VCs fund this parasite.
The new media world is a wild kingdom. The idea of Mutual is decades out of date. And, don’t say any of this in a hushed golf announcer voice.
