Matthew Prince

And the number of like new websites that were being created, number of new domains kind of plateaued from about 2012, 2011, 2012 until actually quite recently.

What's changed is

I think that because a lot of these tools have allowed more people to be creators, to be coders, to be developers, actually for the first time in really the last 15 years, the number of websites that are being created, the number of new things that are happening is actually growing again and growing at rates that look

and resemble like what the early 2000s growth rates of the internet look like.

So I actually think that's kind of optimistic that there's more things that are being created that are out there and are coming online.

I think though that your kind of Disneyland analogy is the right one because I think those of us who have, I mean, I've been on the internet for,

you know, since the early 90s.

And I remember the quirky, weird, people were just putting stuff up for the sake of putting stuff up.

And what feels like it changed along the way is that a business model really did develop around it.

And the core business model of the internet really was advertising.

And Google was the company that did more to push that than anyone else.

You know, we all think of Google as a search engine, but beyond search, they were the ones that provided, you know, with AdSense and DoubleClick and all of those things.

They provided the infrastructure that actually said, I'm going to take traffic and turn it into revenue.

And so the game...

became, because of Google, how do I get as much traffic as possible?

Now that, you know, people have taken that a step further.

So Google kind of turns into Facebook, which turns into TikTok.

And we're increasingly playing this game where the goal is how do I get as much traffic as possible?

Because every bit of traffic, I can then put an ad in front of someone and there's some percentage of those ads that I'm going to get paid for.

So the more traffic I have, essentially the more that I'm going to get.