As many of you know, we’ve been facing an unrelenting campaign of scraping by AI company bots over the last six months. The purpose of this scraping—which involves crawling literally every single page of the website to scrape all of our columns and disc reviews for text—is to obtain human-produced writing that can be used to train large language models (LLMs), essentially AI systems.

These AI are being developed by the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, ByteDance—and these are the very companies whose bots keep scraping us, sometimes multiple times a day. We can directly trace the IP addresses of the data centers where the scraping is coming from and link those to the companies in question.

Now, on the one hand, we should be flattered that all of these companies seem to have identified The Digital Bits as a leader in our content space. But their scraping causes multiple problems for us.

First, our content—the sum total product of all our blood, sweat, and tears for the last 29 years—is being taken without compensation by companies that are using that content to generate profits of their own. They’re not even offering us a pittance in compensation for our work; these multi-billion dollar corporations are just stealing it.

Second, the added and relentless traffic caused by these companies repeatedly scraping every single page of our site puts an enormous strain on our server and bandwidth. When our server and bandwidth are strained by AI bots, it means the site doesn’t load—or it loads very slowly—for our actual readers. And when our readers the encounter this problem repeatedly over time, some of those readers sadly just don’t come back.

Third, it means the site doesn’t work even for us when we’re trying post and edit new content for you guys. This slows down our work dramatically—things that used to take an hour now take two or three. And time is money.

Fourth, it means we have to take expensive measures to increase our resources in the hope of alleviating these problem, like building out more robust server hardware, adding memory, paying for more bandwidth, or implementing security measures like Cloudflare. And running a website isn’t like running a YouTube channel or social media page—it costs us money to do this.

Fifth, the proliferation (and prioritization) of AI-generated results in search engines like Google means that fewer people actually visit our content. Why read one of our disc reviews, when you can just read a quick Gemini or Claude summary of it? And that crushes our advertising revenue—one of the key revenue streams we’ve typically relied upon to fund our work. By the way, AI scraping has crushed this revenue as well—every AI bot loading our pages means one less human reader doing so, and we don’t get paid for non-human eyeballs on our advertising.

And sixth, the fact that Amazon’s customer service has gotten so bad in the last couple of years—particularly for physical media fans—means that our Amazon Affiliate revenue has dropped substantially over that time too, which is another of the key income streams we’ve relied on to fund the site.

Now… when some of you hear us complaining about our revenue declining, you’re probably thinking: So what? You’ve been around 29 years, you’re all doing just fine.

Here’s the thing: For most of the last 29 years, we’ve run The Bits at just above the break-even point. The goal is to make enough revenue to cover our operating costs, so that we can keep going, while keeping the website free for physical media fans the world over to read and benefit from. Only a few of us are getting paid, and trust me: it ain’t much. Certainly, it’s not equal to the value of our time, the quality of our efforts, or the amount of aggravation we’ve dealt with as a result. The fact is, most of those who work on The Bits do so as volunteers, because they love physical media as much as you do.

There’s just no way to run a site like this any other way. We simply aren’t The New York Times, or The Washington Post, or Variety—hell, we aren’t even Horse & Hound (movie joke)! We don’t have those resources. And it’s worth noting that even many of those publications are struggling financially to keep going these days, and/or have gone to subscription models.

Essentially, we run the equivilant of a high-quality magazine on the Internet… one that’s free to all… and have managed to do so for 29 years now. We’ve earned the respect of our industry and our peers, and many physical media fans around the world seem to appreciate what we do or have benefited from it in some way. And we’re grateful for every single one of our readers.

But think about it: How many magazines have you loved over the years that are no longer around? How many websites have you enjoyed over the years that have shut down or gone away? The list is long, folks. And there’s a reason for it—the times are changing. It’s rapidly becoming impossible to operate a highly-trafficked Internet website like ours that’s free to everyone.

And the simple fact is, the only thing that’s keeping The Digital Bits going right now financially is our Patreon page. So I would like to make a humble plea to all of you:

Whether you’ve been a Bits reader since the very beginning, way back in the early days of laserdisc and DVD, or you’ve discovered us more recently via our coverage of Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD… if you love what we do, if you’ve gotten any value out of our work, enjoyed our coverage, and/or feel that it’s brought some value to your life as a physical media fan… hell, if you’re a successful filmmaker, showrunner, or a studio executive we’ve helped over the years in one way or another… please consider subscribing to The Digital Bits’ Patreon page (you can find it here).

You can do so for as little as $6 per month, and you can get a better deal for subscribing for a year at a time. It means everything in terms of helping us to survive—Patreon is literally the single lifeline that’s keeping us going now.

And we’re working to post content there that you simply can’t get anywhere else. I’m personally doing regular My Two Cents: A Video Blog posts on Patreon for our subscribers, where I talk about the latest 4K titles, offer my perspective on industry happenings, share insider information, and give you sneak peeks and insights on 4K catalog titles often many months before they get officially announced. We post other news items too, and we’re working on additional content. We also regularly answer reader questions in our comments on Patreon. It’s becoming a great little community for our readers and physical media fans.

Again, that’s all for just $6 a month. If you’re in a position to donate more, you’re always welcome to, but $6 a month is all we ask—and that gets you access to everything we’re doing on Patreon.

And while I’m making a plea for Digital Bits readers to support our Patreon, I’d also like to add: If you have other physical media websites that you love, please consider supporting them in any way you can as well. Because all of them are struggling too. Case in point: Our friends over at DVD Beaver have recently revealed that they’re having a tough time (see this link). (Hang in there, Gary!)

Look… the bottom line is that we’ve all been fighting for years now to keep physical media alive and to see this hobby we all love so much to grow and thrive. Physical media is struggling today, so you have to support it. And the simple fact is: You need to support your favorite physical media websites too… or I’m sorry to say that they may not be around for very much longer.

So please consider helping The Digital Bits get to 30 years and beyond by subscribing to our Patreon. We promise do our level best to keep going in these challenging times, and to make subscribing worth your while, for as long as you’ll have us.

Thank you very much for listening, and our love out to all of you!

- Bill Hunt

(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter/X, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)