This is the subtle truth that I've seen a few folks on Twitter talking about for the past year or so: That Google has slowly but steadily reduced both the outbound clicks to other websites, but also the portion of their revenue that's based on ads hosted by other websites, while bringing both the "results" and the ad placements in-house, where they no longer have to pay out a share to site owners.
Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.
Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.