Matthew Prince

But what that does is it changes the underlying business model of the web.

And so what we're seeing from people who are selling media as their primary business,

is that they're seeing massive drop-offs in the amount of ad revenue that they're getting.

They're seeing massive drop-offs in the amount of subscription revenue that they're getting.

And as that revenue dries up, it's going to put increasing pressure on content creators.

Fewer and fewer people are going to be willing to actually create content if there's not a business model for it.

And so what I think is, you know, there's sort of the nihilistic outcome, what we just say, you know, anyone who's creating content, like, you know, starts to death and dies.

Like that's a horrible, you know, potential outcome.

There's sort of the black mirror outcome, which is that,

You know, we don't go back to the sort of media of the 1980s, but we go back to the media of the 1400s, which is the Medici's, where there are five powerful families that unless you kind of are under the patronage of one of them, you don't get to do any research.

But instead of families, it would be five big AI companies.

where you've got one that's conservative and one that's liberal, and there'll be a Chinese one, and there'll be an Indian one.

Those are incredibly regressive outcomes.

I think the better outcome is one in which we say, fundamentally, some amount that you're paying for chat GPT, some amount that you're paying for whoever your AI agent is that's out there,

as it is giving you value from the content that is on the web, some amount of that fee or that revenue that the AI companies are generating, that should go back to the content creators.

And to me, that just seems like common sense.

If you think about it, though, like Google has been really one of the real good guys in the web ecosystem.

If Google hadn't created all of the monetization tools that we have, I think the web would be significantly smaller than it is today.

And so, yes, they have reaped significant rewards, but nobody has actually given back to the open web at the scale that Google has.

The irony, though, is that it's sort of like, you know, it's like a Marvel movie.