Kurt Schmidt

Hi, I’m Kurt Schmidt. Together with my family, I run Inside the Magic, a website we’ve proudly owned since 2018. Inside the Magic is dedicated to fans of theme parks and entertainment, with a special focus on Disney parks. This is a perfect fit since we’ve been Disney enthusiasts long before acquiring the site.

What I love most about this work is the passion of the fandom. We dive deep into discussions and debates that some non-fans might consider trivial, like the specifics of a park experience. However, as true fans, these seemingly trivial things are just as important to us as they might be to a sports fan and that fan’s interest in the actions of players on that team. Our shared passion defines our community and, I believe, makes our content unique, valuable, and irreplaceable.

Google has so much influence on my business and others like mine that it’s scary. When deciding to surface content in search, large national publications have always received the lion’s share of the traffic from Google. But we could reliably count on a steady supply of traffic, and results reflected a mix of big and small publishers, each bringing unique benefits to their readers.

But lately, that has changed. Instead of sending traffic to sites like mine when we can best fulfill the reader’s query AND especially when that reader has shown consumed and enjoyed our content in the past, we are now eliminated from appearing in those results. Instead, the traffic is going to larger faceless publications that cover thousands of topics and lack the niche-specific expertise and passion of fan sites like mine.

Furthermore, it’s obvious that Google, OpenAI, and any other AI provider have trained most of their systems in my niche from my content. We used to have a 50%+ market share in the niche, and it would be nearly impossible to have an AI response without our coverage given our market share. Unfortunately, today, having scraped and stolen our content for their use AND THEN redirecting search queries to large national publications, we are seeing a fraction of the traffic that we used to.

This action threatens the very existence of our publication and over time will drastically change the type of coverage found online. Let’s keep it real and return to the fan-focused publications that are passionate about the entertainment news we cover.