Matthew Prince

is for the first time, it's gonna pull the information back to you as opposed to pushing you to the information.

And as it pulls that information back to you, it might be that the AI companies are gonna be able to create great ad businesses themselves, but the people who are the original content creators, the people who are doing the work, going out there, reporting on the news, doing the basic research and science, all of those don't have a business if they're not selling ads and they're not selling subscriptions.

And so in this new platform that is AI, I think that no matter what, people are going to be reading from the AI system, which means they're not going to go back to the original source, which means that it's much harder for whoever's creating that original content to get paid.

Now, the good news is,

At the end of the day, the AI companies need the journalists out there creating content as much as anything else.

They need original content getting fed into the system.

So they have an incentive to actually create a business.

And across, you know, almost all the companies that we've talked to, every one of them has said, like,

we understand that we're happy to pay, but it can't be a position where we pay and no one else does.

This has to be something which is industry-wide and that everyone supports it.

And so I think that's one of the places where we're in an interesting position where we can help set what those standards are, apply them across the entire industry, and then find a way that we can do something where, you know, over time, the AI companies are actually compensating the creators for it.

My hunch is that if you look at the AI companies

You know, take something that's not an AI company.

Take YouTube.

When YouTube first started, it was like a science project.

It was how do I build the technology to be able to deliver a stream of video more reliably and less expensively than anyone else?

And that was their incredible innovation.

Over time, everyone else figured that out.

So that became kind of a commodity.

And so then YouTube pivoted.