DCSki Forums

Scott - DCSki Editor

19 hours ago

Member since 10/10/1999 🔗

1,314 posts

Over the past several decades, DCSki has operated as an independent source of information about skiing in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. Since the mid-1990s, the site has published nearly 2,000 original stories, built an extensive collection of objective resort profiles, preserved the history of 126 lost ski areas in our Lost Areas section, and hosted a forum community that remains knowledgeable, passionate, and respectful.

From the beginning, DCSki has been funded primarily through advertising, supplemented by reader donations. In the early years, many local ski areas were independent operations, and several supported DCSki through sponsorships. Over time, that environment has changed. Advertising budgets have shifted heavily to large social media platforms, and the ski industry has consolidated under multinational corporations that generally work through ad agencies focused on those platforms rather than independent sites.

More recently, independent publishers have faced another challenge: large-scale AI scraping. Some bots now request tens of thousands of pages per day from DCSki, incorporating our original reporting and forum content into their models. While DCSki content is sometimes credited, there is no revenue-sharing mechanism. When readers visit DCSki directly, advertising provides at least some support. When content is consumed elsewhere, it does not.

DCSki has always been run as a sole proprietorship. Advertising revenue and donations have been reinvested to cover hosting, software, development, and other fixed operating expenses, which have increased with inflation. I plan to continue operating DCSki for years to come and to preserve the decades of stories and forum posts that remain fully available online. To make that sustainable, the site will need to rely more on reader support.

DCSki will remain free and open to everyone. However, readers who choose to contribute receive a few optional benefits. Supporters receive a badge next to their forum username and may select their advertising preference: show all ads, show only non-intrusive local ads, or remove ads entirely. These benefits last 12 months from the time of donation.

There is no minimum donation required to receive these benefits. Even $5 is appreciated. The average contribution over the past few years has been $32. Donations are not tax-deductible.

If you would like to help support DCSki’s continued operation, you can learn more or make a contribution here:

https://www.dcski.com/about/support.php

If you have a DCSki Message Forum account, you may include your forum username in the note field on the PayPal page so your account can be updated to reflect Supporter status.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed in the past and to all who participate in and read DCSki. Your involvement is what has made the site what it is.

needawax

6 hours ago

Member since 04/19/2019 🔗

152 posts

I feel like the owners/operators of traditional websites like this one are now faced with the task of disallowing incoming requests from AI sources. I realize its nearly impossible to do, much like handling the traffic in a denial of service attack was years ago - not to mention that anyone can stand up a standalone LLM and such on their hobby machine. So I wish you luck.

I do rely on this site (forums and lost ski areas) often and appreciate the resource.

I am not sure how well the new terrain bodes for traditional websites when the AI result in google and such is the first thing that gets returned to people (especially younger people)

Scott - DCSki Editor

5 hours ago

Member since 10/10/1999 🔗

1,314 posts

needawax wrote:

I feel like the owners/operators of traditional websites like this one are now faced with the task of disallowing incoming requests from AI sources. I realize its nearly impossible to do, much like handling the traffic in a denial of service attack was years ago - not to mention that anyone can stand up a standalone LLM and such on their hobby machine. So I wish you luck.
I do rely on this site (forums and lost ski areas) often and appreciate the resource.
I am not sure how well the new terrain bodes for traditional websites when the AI result in google and such is the first thing that gets returned to people (especially younger people)

It's a challenge for sure. I've spent some time trying to figure out how to block AI requests, but unfortunately, as you note, it's virtually impossible to block the ill-behaved ones as they're implemented as botnets and designed to elude such measures.

Here's an example of my page views over the past 18 months:

This would normally look like a very healthy graph, with a rapidly growing audience. But a lot of that growth (and certainly the "spikes" you see - some exceeding 100,000 page view requests per day) are simply AI bots scraping every character of text off every page.

And here is the unique visitors per day graph, which is even more dramatic:

I mean, that's just crazy. Despite that sudden and continuous surge, I've seen traditional advertising revenue (e.g., from Google AdSense) go down, because AI bots don't view ads.

It is possible to tell AI bots not to scrape the site, but they ignore that request. A majority of the "firehose" requests I'm seeing are actually coming from distributed I.P. addresses in China.

This isn't the first challenge smaller, independent web sites have faced over the years, of course.

As you note, Google is trying to provide AI-produced "answers" right at the top of search results, so users never end up clicking on to other web sites. (This is the "no click" problem publishers are fretting about right now.)

But ultimately, it will be a problem if/when independent sites and human journalists disappear. Because AI can only provide answers for what it's trained on. Some of those answers might be "evergreen" (how many ounces are in a gallon?), but for anything that's evolving and changing, they need to keep scraping and training on new data. If there's no motivation for humans to produce that new data, AI results will become stale and outdated and incomplete.

It does seem like a "patron" type model is increasingly becoming the solution for sites like DCSki continue on. And I really appreciate any contributions users can make.

needawax

5 hours ago

Member since 04/19/2019 🔗

152 posts

We don't want human reviewers, journalists, and people making comments to disappear. I've made a donation, and thanks for all the work over the years.