📥 Hello, and greetings from the Central Office
As part of our commitment to open communication, here are the infrastructure and analytics updates completed this month.
Analytics & Infrastructure
• New Analytics site launched at analytics.wpfolio.com.
• Opt-in Dashboard UI and data pipeline created.
• Secure API endpoints built for sender and receiver workflows.
• Mailchimp data export preparation begun with dynamic filtering options.
Maintenance & CI/CD
• CircleCI build issues fixed across PDA Free, PPWP, and PDA IP Block.
• Updated Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy for PPWP.
• Staging environments for PDA, PPWP, and Analytics fully rebuilt.
Billing & Licensing
• Continued merging SendOwl subscriptions into Stripe.
• Renewal failures monitored daily.
• Testing underway for migrating pre June 2025 purchases to the new licensing system.
More progress will be shared next week.
Own Your Archives or Get Zero When AI Scrapes Your Content
For two decades, the arrangement between search engines and creators was straightforward: creators allowed crawling, search engines sent referral traffic back. That traffic funded content creation through ads and subscriptions.
AI features are breaking this deal. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and answer engines keep users within their platforms instead of sending them to source sites. Creators watch traffic decline while AI companies crawl more content than ever.
When AI Overviews appear in results, only 8% of users click any link compared to 15% without AI summaries. That's a 46.7% drop. Just 1% clicked citation links within the AI Overview itself. Zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between 2024 and 2025. Organic traffic to U.S. websites declined from 2.3 billion visits to under 1.7 billion in the same period.
Cloudflare's analysis shows the imbalance: Google crawls 10 pages and sends back 1 visitor. OpenAI crawls 1,200 to 1,700 pages per visitor sent back. AI companies take far more than they return.
Three Payment Models, One Requirement
Fewer pageviews mean fewer ad impressions, lower subscription conversions, and reduced affiliate revenue. Three payment models emerged to replace the old economics: usage-based revenue sharing (Perplexity's Comet Plus with TIME, Fortune, LA Times), flat licensing deals (OpenAI paying $10M-$100M+, News Corp securing hundreds of millions), and legal settlements (Anthropic's $1.5B author settlement). Only creators with vast archives can negotiate meaningful deals.
The same economics apply at every scale. A WordPress site owner with 1,000 posts owns archives that could be licensed or blocked via robots.txt. A Medium creator with 1,000 posts owns nothing and can't negotiate when traffic disappears. Infrastructure ownership determines whether you have leverage or watch revenue decline without compensation.
Some publishers accepted deals (Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith). Others sued (New York Times, Forbes), arguing deals undervalue their journalism.
Licensed Web vs Open Web: Archive Ownership Decides
The payment model differences are creating two tiers of web content: Licensed Web (creators with archives negotiate deals, get compensation for training data and citations) and Open Web (crawlable content without compensation beyond minimal referral traffic). Creators investing in specialized content have licensing options. Those creating commodity information struggle when traffic disappears.
Platform Dependency Means Zero Leverage
The infrastructure economics mirror platform dependency in social media. A creator with a vast archive has negotiating leverage. A creator without archives or with content hosted on Medium, Substack, or platform-dependent infrastructure has zero leverage. Same revenue decline. Different negotiating positions entirely.
Crawl ratios hit 1,200:1. Clicks dropped 46.7%. Only archive owners can negotiate when traffic disappears. Secure your WordPress content now.
Companies recruit employees as branded TikTok creators to showcase workplace culture — Starbucks barista Bridget Baron hit 800,000 views on company-approved videos. Delta handpicked 15 front-line employees for its creator program. Portillo's chose 15 staff for Maxwell Street Mavens. The constraint: Starbucks still prohibits baristas from posting on shift, in aprons, or behind the bar unless preapproved. Platform visibility requires company mediation. Employee creators depend on both employer approval and algorithmic favor.
YouTube Shorts algorithm now prioritizes content uploaded in the last 30 days, crashing views on older videos — Mario Joos analyzed channels pulling 100 million to 1 billion views monthly and found a complete crash in short-form views on content older than one month starting in September. The change affects nearly every creator across the platform regardless of size. Revenue from back catalogs disappeared overnight. The shift: quality to quantity. Creators now depend on high-volume uploads in 30-day windows rather than building lasting content libraries.
YouTube's deepfake detection tool requires biometric data Google can use to train AI models — The likeness detection feature requires creators to upload government ID and biometric video of their face. Google's privacy policy states public content, including biometric information, can be used "to help train Google's AI models and build products and features." YouTube says it has never used creator biometric data for AI training and is reviewing the policy language. Experts at Vermillio and Loti recommend clients not sign up. Doctor Mike uses the tool to review dozens of AI-manipulated medical advice videos weekly. The trade-off: protection from deepfakes in exchange for biometric data control.
Nonprofits can increase donations by simplifying forms, adding recurring options, and telling stories — WPBeginner's guide covers 14 tactics including suggested donation amounts, progress bars, and automatic thank-you emails. One client maintained 60-70% newsletter open rates regardless of send schedule. The insight: owned infrastructure (email lists, membership platforms) generates measurable signals platform-dependent metrics can't capture. Nonprofits building on owned WordPress infrastructure control donation forms, payment processing, and donor data. Those depending on Facebook fundraising tools control nothing.
MrBeast attributed his YouTube success to high-budget spectacles, originality, and quality obsession during court deposition — The creator employs 300 staffers in his Greenville, NC headquarters and roughly 450 total to pull off video stunts. He has 450 million subscribers across platforms. "I'm just really obsessed with the quality of my videos and do everything in my power to make it as good as possible," Donaldson said. Former staffers note he'll throw out already filmed videos if they don't meet his standards. The scale shows platform-dependent operations: 450 million subscribers and 450 employees, but still dependent on YouTube's algorithm for discovery and monetization.
WordStream by LocaliQ surveyed 300+ U.S. small and medium-sized businesses across 24 industries. Sixty-four percent listed social as a main traffic driver, beating organic search at 52%. Solopreneurs and micro-businesses ranked social first. Thirty-five percent of businesses without a website said social and marketplaces give them enough leads that they don't need one. Platform dependency reached new levels: more than one-third of SMBs operate entirely on rented infrastructure with zero owned web presence.
Michael
Operator @WP Folio - now WP Defense Lab. Same Plugins. Different Name.