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Almost 30 years ago, two graduate students at Stanford University — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — began working on a research project they called Backrub. That, of course, was the project that resulted in Google. But also something more: it created the business model for the web.
The deal that Google made with content creators was simple: let us copy your content for search, and we'll send you traffic. You, as a content creator, could then derive value from that traffic in one of three ways: running ads against it, selling subscriptions for it, or just getting the pleasure of knowing that someone was consuming your stuff.
Google facilitated all of this. Search generated traffic. They acquired DoubleClick and built AdSense to help content creators serve ads. And acquired Urchin to launch Google Analytics to let you measure just who was viewing your content at any given moment in time.
For nearly thirty years, that relationship was what defined the web and allowed it to flourish.
But that relationship is changing. For the first time in its history, the number of searches run on Google is declining. What's taking its place? AI.
42 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 1 Jul
The web is changing. Its business model will change. And, in the process, we have an opportunity to learn from what was great about the web of the last 30 years and what we can make better for the web of the future.
I read this as Cloudflare wants to be in the middle of the revenue stream.
Imagine an AI engine like a block of swiss cheese. New, original content that fills one of the holes in the AI engine’s block of cheese is more valuable than repetitive, low-value content that unfortunately dominates much of the web today.
I guess they're saying ai should present the original content to people rather than summarize it? Or is it that if content is something novel it should get a boost in search? Or maybe again what they mean is that AI companies should pay people to crawl their pages and the market would naturally lead them to pay more for content that is actually useful to the llm. Probably that one. (it's a weird analogy).
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I'm not exactly sure what Cloudflare's intentions are, but I’ve got no doubt that billing is a big part of it. And honestly, they’ve got a right to that...
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