Ethan Smith: belief

Transcript context

…Coming back to a question you raised at the beginning. So for my newsletter, the fact that they're sucking up all this content, I don't even know how much, and sending me some percent of traffic. Do you have any, I don't know, just sense of is this good? If you were running my newsletter, would you encourage all these outlets to suck up my stuff? And then be like, "Oh yeah, you could check it out in Lenny's Newsletter if you want"? Yes. And I would give the same answer that Brian Balfour gave on your previous episode on this, which is that it's not your choice whether to play the game. You are playing the game whether you want to or not, so you might as well try to show up. If you just say, "Don't look at any of my data," then you cannot show up and your competitors will. Now, what you can do is you can say, "I don't want you to train on my data, so you can index my site, but please don't train on my data." And they have different user agents for that and different bots, so you can just say, "And we're building a Webflow app to block training but not indexation." Or you can just put it in your robots.txt, "This training bot not allowed. Index bot, you are allowed." So if you're concerned about that, I would suggest that, and I think probably a lot of people will do that. But saying, "You can't index my site at all," that doesn't make sense to me. Such a good point, because I don't know if I have competitors in this exact space, but basically they would show up instead and then I lose all that traffic.…

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