Matthew Prince

And since agents don't click on ads, then all of these companies are just massively losing the revenue that they're getting from their ad-based business models.

And that's gonna start to hurt.

It's already hurting content creation, which is out there, either by content creators putting walls up where neither you nor your agents can get to that content, or in many cases, publications shuttering because they can't actually have a business model to support themselves anymore.

Can we just double down on why this is bad?

Yeah, so first of all, I'm not sure it means it's more free for more people.

Most of these AI companies, their business model is actually, again, there's a subscription that you pay

And that gives you a certain amount of access to it.

And again, for us, that's fine.

I can pay $20 a month or $100 a month or $1,000 a month if I want.

But I think actually the people who are in the global south, people who don't have the ability to pay for those subscriptions, I actually think that the internet's getting smaller for them, not bigger.

And I don't think these AI tools are actually solving a lot of their problems.

I think it's actually...

They feel like those things that the wealthy people have on the other side of the wall, but they don't.

And I think that's a problem that we're going to have to wrestle with.

And almost any solution that we come up with is not necessarily going to solve.

I think back to the other question, though, is, like, you know, you said maybe the independent publications are going to have to shutter.

I'm not sure that every publication isn't going to have to shutter.

Like, if over time, and we've watched where the difficulty of getting traffic back to your site...

As compared to sort of the Google of old, today it's 20 times harder with Google than it used to be.

But that's the good news.