Matthew Prince

Almost every single AI company that I talk to says, of course, we should be paying for content, but it needs to be a level playing field.

It needs to be something where if we're paying, Google has to pay too.

And so once we get Google to say, yes, we're willing to pay, I actually think that we might actually unlock a huge new business model for the web and for content creators and potentially unlock really a new golden age of content creation.

I mean, Google, of course, is one of the players.

Absolutely.

But I think that what's optimistic to me

If you sort of understand what the incentives are, I think that the incentives of this new model may lead us to an Internet that all of us would like better than the Internet that we have today.

Those of us who have, you know, a little bit of gray hair, been around around a while, you know, kind of sometimes long for the Internet of old, which was more local, more unique, more creative, more quirky.

And that, you know, you would stumble across things that were that were, you know, super, super interesting.

What gives me hope is it turns out that what AI companies value is more unique, more local, more original, more quirky.

And the best example of this is who is it that has struck the best deal with the AI companies?

And the answer is Reddit.

Reddit and the New York Times, if you add up their total catalogs, have about the same number of tokens in them.

The New York Times has obviously been around a lot longer.

Reddit produces more on a daily basis.

But it's roughly the same.

And yet the publicly available deal that we know that Reddit did versus the publicly available deals that we know that the New York Times has done, Reddit got about seven times more per token than the New York Times.

And the question is why?

And I think the answer is exactly what you said, which is I love the New York Times.

I think they're a great media organization.