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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

You’re totally right, and that’s why I think this era will fail.

Web 2.0 failed because eventually people realized to make money they needed to serve ads, and to do that they needed to own the UI. Making it easy to exfiltrate data meant switching cost was low, too. Can’t have that when you’re trying to squeeze value out of users. Look at the evolution of the twitter API over the 2.0 era. That was entirely motivated by Twitter’s desperate need to make money through ads.

Only way we avoid that future is if we figure out new business models, but I doubt that will happen. Ads are too lucrative and people too resistant to pay for things.

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ads really aren’t all that lucrative, though, they’re just simple. I worked for a company that was trying to figure out an alternative to ad revenue (we failed) and our people did some research and the average internet user ends up being shown (if I remember correctly) like $60/month of ads, total.

That’s not surprising and is also so depressing. Imagine what the Internet would be like if there were zero ads and zero of the dark patterns that they essentially force every web site operator to engage in. And all for sixty measly bucks a month that we’d spend in microtransactions or subscriptions or whatever. :(

It’s an average, you can’t just charge everyone in the world and have an ad-free worldwide internet. About 2 billion of internet users are probably worth 0.60$ pm while 200m are worth 600$ of ads pm.

Maybe lucrative isn’t the right word but it’s more profitable than the alternative. Call it simple but there’s only so many ways to monetize people that feel entitled to digital works and refuse to open their wallet.

People are willing to pay for AI. Some of this money flow could be diverted to the MCP provider.

In practice it'll just mean that each MCP provider will have API tokens and it'll be even harder to lock down spending than AWS. Maybe companies will need to have a company wide system prompt to pretty please don't use the expensive APIs too much.

why cant i serve ads thru my mcp?

Obviously it’s possible. And just like the early internet ad networks…

You can’t guarantee they’ll be shown and interpreted correct by the downstream LLM, you can’t guarantee attribution later when a user makes a purchase, you can’t collect (as much) data on users for targeting, etc

The biggest ad networks today (Google, Meta) have strong first party data operations, strong first party attribution techniques, and strong targeting, either through intent (search) or profiles (meta).

MCP originated ads really only threaten Google (via intent based ads), and they’re quickly moving I to owning the UX of LLMs, securing their place in this value chain.

Because then you'd be serving ads to an LLM?

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