Matthew Prince

And I'm certain that

you know, that, you know, 30 years from now someone will be being like, ah, all the stuff that, you know, Cloudflare did really screwed up the internet.

So, yeah.

That's right.

So first of all, you're absolutely right.

The ads economy has been declining.

And that's been true because people got privacy blockers, ad blockers that were out there.

That was changing the equation.

I don't think that the internet has always explained well enough that the trade-off was like, we'll take the energy and the infrastructure to give you this content.

But in exchange, we get to show you ads, right?

And that was the quid pro quo that was there.

And again, I think that I'm sitting here in Europe, like a lot of people just don't get that.

Like they don't understand that that was the trade.

It was just like, well, I should be able to get this stuff for free, but you can't show me any ads that are out there.

That doesn't work and it's been declining.

But the change that's been so dramatic has really been in just the last two years.

And that change has really been driven by OAI.

You sort of saw this steady decline in sort of ad revenue, in what are called CPMs, which is sort of the rate that you get for an advertisement that was out there.

Those were sort of declining over time.

But in the last little bit, what's happened is you've just seen a just sharp, almost step function drop in the value that people are being able to get from these ads that they're delivering.