I think the original sin was we couldn’t actually build economics, which is to say money, into the core of the internet and so therefore advertising became the primary business model…
When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quantity, and the ratio matters: a publication with 1 valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will more easily earn subscriptions than one with 3 valuable articles and 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects. Yet all too many local newspapers, built for an ad-based business model that calls for daily content to wrap around ads, spend their limited resources churning out daily filler even though those ads no longer exist.
The quality-over-quantity economics of subscription content points toward the decline of aggregators. When paying audiences reward depth over breadth, the competitive advantage shifts from distribution scale to narrative quality — creators who tell compelling stories will outperform platforms that merely collect content.expect that this model will endure in the age of AI; obviously I’m biased on this point, but in a world of infinite content-on-demand, common content becomes community: if I’m successful this essay will generate a lot of discussion amongst a lot of people precisely because it is both original and widely accessible, funded by an audience that wants me to keep on writing Articles exactly like this. The Death of the Ad-Supported Web The ad-supported web — particularly text-based sites — is going to fare considerably worse.
Good content generates community as it always has, but in the age of AI, ad-supported consumption will decline because human attention is finite. When AI can answer questions directly, the eyeballs that once drove ad revenue will no longer pass through the content that hosts those ads.Why go through the hassle of typing a search term and choosing the best link — particularly as search results are polluted by an increasingly overwhelming amount of SEO spam, now augmented by generative AI — when ChatGPT (or Google itself) will simply give you the answer you are looking for? In short, every leg of the stool that supported the open web is at best wobbly: users are less likely to go to ad-supported content-based websites, even as the long tail of advertisers might soon lose their conduit to place ads on those websites, leaving said websites even less viable than they are today
It means that those things that people are offering up via NLWeb will be accessible to any agent that speaks MCP. So you really can think about it a little bit like HTML for the agentic web. We have done a bunch of work already with partners who have been really excited and been able to really very quickly get to quick implementations and prototypes using NLWeb. We’ve worked with TripAdvisor, O’Reilly Media, a ton of really great companies that offer important products and services on the internet
As more and more of the answers appear directly, particularly in AI-based search products, traffic to websites has generally dropped. We see this over and over again. What’s going to replace that in the agentic era, where we’ve created new schema for agents to come and talk to my website and receive some answers? What’s going to make that worth it?
This is where Scott’s exhortation of openness is spot on: a world of one dominant AI making business development deals with a few blessed content creators, and scraping the carcass of what remains on the web for everything else, is a far less interesting one than one driven by marketplaces, auctions, and aligned incentives.
