A New Internet Business Model?

Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.

The "level playing field" rhetoric reminds me so much of Apple talking about the App Store. This new internet business model is just the App Store, substituting websites for apps and Cloudflare for Apple. The system only works with some middleman between the AI companies and the content creators.

"Content creators" are part of the problem. Generating endless "content", which isn't very useful or valuable, and creates too much "content supply", which devalues it. This then creates a giant "soup" of content that viewers drown in, trying to find some content that isn't as identically useless as all the rest. But the big incumbents love it, because they use this content soup to collect money from - you guessed it - ad companies. (Those same companies they don't want to make ad-blockers against...)

So now that search is dead, they need to find a new way to drink from the ad-dollar faucet. At first it'll be "pay content creators from AI subscription money", but then AI will be offered "free with ads", and then later "paid with ads". And nobody's going to stop it, because everyone is "happy": the viewer gets their free crap (with ads), the content creators get a few pennies, the big companies rake in billions, and ad companies continue their "industrial welfare" by pouring their excess profits into this whole system as ad-dollars. The great commoditization of eyeballs continues.

This is also being attempted by RSL with their “Crawler Authentication Protocol” (https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers) for demanding proof of licensing from scrapers and RSL Collective (https://rslcollective.org) for providing the licensing itself. The missing piece there is the ability to detect scrapers with high accuracy without punishing regular browsing humans.

Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? From my point of view, most of the highly-valuable information came from the various forums, wikis and personal sites, on all of which people would publish the information for free. Ads were largely used to cover hosting costs of the large forums and wikis, but the content creators saw not a single dime.

Over the last 15 years, the search results have shifted from this, to instead become 100% news articles and SEO spam, all with a lot of fluff and very little substance, tons of ads, pop-ups, autoplay videos and subscription walls. All of this is well funded thanks to the business model, but for what? I can't imagine anyone sitting through all that crap to get to what they were looking for. There's a reason people would tell others to add "reddit" to the search query only a few years back, and even that's becoming less worthwhile.

Is this really what we want to preserve? Big publications and their interests?

> Swiss Cheese — there's a lot of cheese, but there's also a lot of holes.

Such hubris! Human knowledge is not like Swiss (mostly known with a few gaps). Human knowledge is like a high-dimensional fractal broccoli: a stem of hard-won knowledge surrounded by a vast frontier of unknown. The hardest part of pushing on the frontier is deciding where to push. Deciding what to research requires taste.

> You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.

Honestly, this sounds like a Mozilla press release. The spin is absurd

Before ISPs existed, someone else paid. Universities, governments, selected corporations, etc.

After ISPs (post-UUNet), internet subscribers have always had to pay

Who finances the data collection, i.e., the transfer of data from/about subscribers to the so-called "tech" company for commercial exploitation. Hint: It is not the so-called "tech" companies

When I first accessed the internet, and later the www, the term "creators" was never used to describe people who used it

Methinks "creators" is SillyCon Valley speak for "unpaid independent contractors". Why not use the term "producers"

The gigantic websites comprised of other peoples' work, today's so-called "platforms", are not "creators", they produce nothing. Despite billions of dollars at their disposal, and vast amounts of published material, their production costs are small. This is because production costs are outsourced to unpaid independent contractors. The material the "platforms" publish does not belong to them, they are only third party intermediaries (middlemen)

In the original internet, people publishing on the internet via websites produced the website content themselves

Today, "platforms" are not creating anything except a baited trap for people using the internet, whether they are "creators" (producers) or consumers, where internet users can be spied on for advertising purposes. And the targets of this surveillance and subsequent targeted advertising will even pay for sending the surveillance data collected to the interlopers

Today's "creators" may be paid (if they are lucky, like winning a lottery) or not (the other 99%, their free contributions serve as bait). But "make no mistake", it is not the third party intermediary "platforms" that pay "creators", it is advertisers, but only after the "platforms" (middlemen) take a cut

SillyCon Valley calls this an "ecosystem". But today's internet, cf. the original one, IMHO looks more like a toxic waste dump

I don't fundamentally think that Cloudflare's view here is _wrong_ - by and large, when I google what internal temperature to cook pork to so I don't die, I'm not looking for an opinion or someone's life story - but I think I'm much more interested in how we create the weird niches that create the "knowledge" for the blender. Cloudflare alludes to it with the talk about Reddit and whatnot, but I'd love to know what the plan is to actually create and nurture those communities where people can really get weird into whatever topic they're interested in. Right now we're all sort of just ghettoized into various Facebook communities or whatever, but recreating an actual vibrant communal internet where people can find their weirdo subcultures and actually negotiate on some kind of reasonable footing with the LLM scrapers (who were the social network people, who were the search engine people, who have always been the ad people) would be a genuine improvement to the internet.

* read "hellish swamp diving affair"

This is the old "blockchains will create new niches for creators" / "rent-seeking is Good Actually" argument, barely reheated. Total imagination bankruptcy from C-suite.

Because the providers will act as a single tunnel that all content passes through before reaching the end user, the tolls they collect will be large. So, I don't doubt that there will still be opportunities for content creators to earn money as answer engines siphon off more and more of the web's traffic, but expect those opportunities to be broadly low-paying, falling decidedly in the "side hustle" category.

AI providers will want to incentivize content creation. There will still be a glut of ready providers, and little reason for providers to make anything but small, nominal payments.

The new model will be something like:

1. A content creator creates a web site and uses Cloudflare.

2. AI companies pay Cloudflare to allow them to scrape content.

3. Cloudflare gives a cut to the content creator.

4. Users pay AI companies and get their questions answered.

A few observations/predictions:

* If this works, there will be competitors to Cloudflare (AWS, Microsoft, etc.) who will offer better terms to content creators. Content creators can then (easily) switch to whichever reverse-proxy has the best terms.

* Media companies will transform into Cloudflare competitors, aggregating content and monetizing by selling to AI. Their pitch will be that the content will be more curated than Cloudflare. Their brands might survive if the AIs pass the source of the content all the way to the user. For example, the AI says something like, "According to a BBC contributor....". Otherwise, media brands will no longer be known to consumers (only AI companies will care).

* If this works, AI companies will try to cut out the middle-man by building their own ecosystem of content creators.

* As more and more people get their answers directly from AI, it will be easier to sell content directly to AI companies. I.e., instead of publishing something on the open web and relying on Robots.txt to protect your content, you will sell content straight to the AI company. NOTE: If this happens, then the only way this will scale is if the AI itself decides which content it wants to buy for the next training run.

* At the limit, the web and everything about it basically disappears. Everyone gets their content directly from an AI and never visits a web site directly. Therefore, web sites disappear and all that's left is the HTTP protocol, which is used by AI clients to talk to the AI cloud.

    ads have been the only micropayment
    system that has worked

I wonder how the web would look like if one could click "pay 1 cent to continue".

Maybe content would become better? Maybe it would make one think "Hmm... one moment, is this something I want to read or am I just doomscrolling?".

That said, the mental model that this article uses only recognizes that new content can fill in "holes" (interpolation). It also can expand the boundaries in new directions (extrapolation). That is a different and harder problem. If you distribute money to people "based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese", you really aren't expanding the boundaries of human knowledge as much as you are strengthening existing knowledge. They need to take boundary expansion into account here.

I also recognize that we know where the holes or boundaries are in many fields. They are "known unknowns". But this proposal does not take into account "unknown unknowns" --- things that we do not even realize that we don't know yet. It's going to be harder to incentive research into unknown unknowns when we don't even know what they are yet.

Many of us who use an ad blocker don't actually have a huge problem with ads. It's the tracking we object to.

I don't want Cloudflare to build an ad blocker, I want them to make a tracker blocker. Make surveillance so difficult and expensive and unreliable that companies stop doing it.

It sucks big time to live in an internet with cloudflare

(Note that everything CloudFlare talked about in this blog post also applies to adblock users, not just AI agents.)

The golden age of the Internet is not where people do it for money, or for views. That way lies clickbait and content farms. The golden age of the Internet is one where people share information because they want to.

Source: https://1gn15.com/cloudflare

The bigger problem I see coming down the line, given the current business model for the internet, is what happens when investors need a return. When the LLM only provides one “correct” answer, the only way to make money from advertisers is to influence that answer. At least just now we are presented with information which we evaluate ourselves, though even this is subject to manipulation.

https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-cloudflare-fo...

Ok the the toxic nature of the internet and social media in general and what has become of our digital age, totally agree that it's rage and click bait. I wrote something to that effect here https://github.com/micro/mu/issues/27. But I personally don't think we're going to directly interact with agents the whole time. They will exist, they will be somewhere in the middle layers, there might even be a chat interface that replaces search queries with answers but I think the whole web as a whole and social media needs a rethink. Ads as a business model has to die, even though clearly it won't and we need to shift our attention elsewhere.

Examples:

Pingora claims to be battle-tested, but I have a hard time believing that it's to the same level of quality as whatever Cloudflare runs internally. https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora/issues/601

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/ was not open source.

Small parts of Oxy were open sourced as "foundations" but the repo gives off the impression of a checkbox for someone rather than a serious commitment to building CF's own services on top of it — not "open, collaborative, standardized, and shared across many organizations".

This is an attempt to rewrite history. Back in the day, we stood up servers at our own expense and filled them with content for free, for nothing other than the fun of it. In fact, the "vibrancy" of the internet appears to be inversely correlated to the number of people using it to generate a profit.

The problem isnt oh no people wont be viewing ads and thus creators wont get paid. The problem is "why arent people who view these websites willing to pay?". So many subscriptions are like $5 a month but if we consider how much a creator is paid for showing you an ad its like 0.0005 cents. I'd rather pay that everytime i view a page than look at ads or have cloudflare pay people to create the content openAI thinks I want.

Funding the content we consume should be cheap considering how many people are there consuming it and how cheap it is these days to serve content.

> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.

> It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.

Imagine a future where:

The Internet rewards passionate creators more than instrumental alpha-seekers. This is key. But how?

We publish everything for free under reciprocal licenses like the AGPL and CC-BY-SA, not permissive licenses like the MIT and CC-BY. Those who take from the pile must add to it, or at least not claim it as exclusively their own.

Creators are rewarded by the populace via direct payments, like how streamers are rewarded. People decide what's valuable and what's slop, not Big Brother.

This creates an incentive structure where:

Those who make software and content because they love it will have more resources to make more quality stuff.

Those who make software and content for the money but actually hate what they do will find something else to do because companies will pay them less.

There are two necessary conditions that must be met, that we can work on right now:

We recognize artificial scarcity as evil, so we can enforce reciprocal licenses socially and bypass the broken legal apparatus.

We use multiple competing payment platforms to pay creators and receive payments, so there is incentive for these platforms to get better.

Reminds me of that bit of Snow Crash, where the freelancers sell data to the Library of Congress.

What CF didn't address is how the smallest content creators are going to be "making deals" with the Answer Engines. They aren't.

Even if some system of making crawlers pay for a content access, how could you be sure it's never used without your permission? It's not like DRM solved internet piracy.

And even if a technical solution were possible, it's natural to see this level of cynicism of how an internet giant would handle it.

Yeah right, most of it is now proxied in cleartext through them!

I'm not sure why there would be an expectation from most users that AI should compensate creators.

Kudos to CF for pointing out the dips in the road ahead. A big, juicy problem to tackle.

What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in human knowledge". We all know that is not what sells, and that the opposite of this will continue to inundate the infosphere.

Jesus Christ I knew when I clicked on this link it was going to be corporate propaganda which pushes a specific narrative favorable to their business model, but this is just wrong.

It's one thing to say that online content has always relied on having somebody to foot the bill for infrastructure if the content can't offset that overhead itself but they're just lying as if none of those forums, IRC rooms and crazy geocities/angelfire webrings ever existed. As if there is nothing on the internet today which exists for its own sake rather than as the outcome of a creator's profit-motive.

(https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...)

What could possibly go wrong?

I don’t know if I see a company extracting rent from other people as a win…

Creators should be able to trace and quantify exactly what data of theirs was fed into the grift machine and be reimbursed directly by the grift machine custodian each time their data is used to generate new output.

A middleman who collects a giant chunk of creator royalties, for data that will be used perpetually by the grift machine... that sounds like a bad deal.

I think what Cloudflare is advocating for is preservation of a “public+Ads” bundle where ads are viewed by a human. So they want to disentangle a computer reading something (the core premise of the internet) from a human putting eyes on it.

I wouldn’t mind see a world in which more content is private and the creator can decide how to monetize. It feels like Cloudflare stepping in to say public != public is an overreach.

* Assuming AI companies will pay for content instead of just stealing it

* Assuming they'll pay enough to sustain a business, even though they're incentivized and positioned to pay as little as possible

* Assuming AI companies will give a shit about trustworthy content, as the moat (at least right now) for developing an LLM is too huge for them to seriously worry about competitors. And even if they did, it'd likely result in consolidation rather than innovation

* Assuming the AI companies (or anyone) would even be able to distinguish credible human content from AI generated slop

I don't see this working out. Props to cloud flare marketing though. This advertisement generated a good amount of discussion.

> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old.

Removing all the vibrant parts is long due, apparently :')

I'm always fascinated by companies capacity to make deregulation the answer to every problem, included deregulation. Neoliberalism never fails to make me cringe, the idea that any value comes as a direct consequence of the business model is not surprising coming from tech companies but still.

> So how will the business model work? [...] Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating [...] but instead rewards those content creators [...]. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators ...

This isn't revolutionary and won't remove the biggest issues with the internet, This is basically how youtube remunerates content creators, that counts AI using your data as a "view" or remunerable unit of consumption.

AI companies will never agree to remunerate anyone without a fight. They spent billions on their AI models and want ROI.

Remember how youtube demonetises content with not 'advertiser friendly' content ? is that how the whole internet works now ? can i get removed from the internet if Trump affiliated CEOs hate me ?

> Our conversations with the leading AI companies nearly all acknowledge that they have a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and compensate content creators. Confirming this, the largest publishers are reporting they're having much more constructive conversations about licensing their content to those AI companies.

So, pretty transparently, you make content, that content is owned by a publisher, that publisher gives that content to an AI company, the AI company pays back the publisher (how things already work so far), and then the publisher aggrees to give some of it back to the creators. How does cloudflare plan to promise this ? they mention "collaboration" so non binding agreements, as i assume OpenAI won't agree to pay fines to cloudflare for not paying you the 20 bucks you think you deserve for your content.

At no point do they even entertain the idea that you should be remunerated based on how often AI serves your content, or that this remuneration should be mendatory.

This letter would create incredible opportunities for censorship and abuse. Just a few days after Trump makes companies pull Jimmy and Stephen, Cloudflare propose a new internet, controlled by them, centralized in america, where Trump, or any future president could just order Wikipedia to be removed or demonetized. No thanks

If the open internet is already dead (and it is already dead), it’s better to accept that reality and silo off the good parts behind paywalls so that people can get paid, rather than to let bad people benefit massively from it while they build their walled gardens. This has been a long time coming.

Fantastic! I wish I could undermine their clickbait business model even more..

> But there’s reason for optimism

You mean Cloudflare being investigated for antitrust?