My name is Brian Warner and I’m writing this testimony today to share my experiences as the founder of a website called CelebrityNetWorth.com. CelebrityNetWorth (CNW) aims to provide accurate and informative content about the finances of notable people to an audience of dedicated users and curious individuals.
In July 2012, when users performed “net worth” searches for a handful of our most famous entries,Google began displaying thenumeric answer from our site directly at the top of the search result page. Imagine a large bold number taking up one-third of the result page. No attribution wasgiven to any source, even though the numbers were clearly unique and original to CNW. I declined Google’s request to provide an API to our data. Bymid-2015, Google began displaying “Featured Snippet”net worth answer boxes for roughly 1,000 of the most popularcelebritiesin the world. CNW’s traffic dropped 20% from this release. But the worst was yet to come. Our traffic plummeted by 50% overnight. Today our traffic is 80% lower than it was in 2014
— source docs.house.gov | Brian Warner | July 16, 2019