The original online contract used to be clear:
- Publishers provided content in exchange for attention and payment.
- Users accepted ads for free content.
- Advertisers paid for access to users' attention. It looked like this:
This system worked because traffic meant monetization. More visitors meant more ad impressions, which meant more revenue. Sites could invest in better content, knowing they'd be compensated through advertising, and a selection of visitors became subscribers.
For a long time, this worked. Entire empires were built off this idea.
AI destroyed that contract and replaced it with a new one: The reason it’s quicker than ever to get things is because they’re being indexed without permission. It’s starting to look more like this.
Now it’s all changing again. As agents become more intelligent, traffic is dropping, and an entirely new protocol is being developed. There are some interesting proposals about what may come next.