As part of my usual year end work on my Web sites, I noted a few things along the way:
- There are over 10,000 pages across the various byThom Web sites.
- There were over 5000 specific ads and affiliate links on those pages (plus the B&H ad that appeared at the bottom of every page). These have now been removed.
- Over half the mirrorless lenses announced and documented on the sansmirror.com site are no longer available (making sansmirror one of the few sources where you can still find specs for them). Some of this is obvious, as the Canon M, Nikon 1 (CX), Pentax Q, and Samsung NX mounts have perished. Still, there were quite a few surprises of XF, m4/3, and FE mount lenses that have gone away and are now only available used.
- Sigma favors FE/L mount while Tamron favors FE/Z mount. No one (other than Canon) tilts RF mount.
- No one seems to have noticed that I added RED cameras to the zsystemuser.com site (just the bots seem to be hitting those pages).
- While the site readership stats remain about the same for 2025 as they did for 2024, overall site traffic over doubled. Why? AI bots. Including ones that are ignoring several "no crawl" directives. So many companies are so afraid that they're going to miss the AI "revolution" that they'll just greedily scrape anything they can find so that they can fill their servers with ammunition. I'll make the prediction now: we're not going to have many winning companies out of the AI push. Most investments being made behind the scenes cannot be made back in profits down the line (if they could, you'd in aggregate be paying trillions of dollars to just access AI in the future). Moreover, I'm seeing a lot of circular-dealing going on (I'll invest/buy in/from you if you invest/buy in/from me). The big (e.g. Google) will get bigger, most of the newcomers will get acquired or go away.
- SEO (search engine optimization) no longer works anywhere near how it once did. You're getting steered by only a few companies now (and steered to only a few select places that won the bidding), and AI is going to make that worse. Revenue from ads and affiliate links probably won't be enough for most sites to survive.