The issue with generative AI and LLMs, web search, ads, and payment to the websites that host the information that gets pulled is that, for various reasons, it breaks the old click-through and advertising dollars. That is putting a money squeeze on sites who need to pay the bills. It’s a big shift in the economic model of the web. Cloudflare has begun blocking crawlers and scrapers off sites, but companies like Google are mixing agents, crawling and scraping into similar IPs and patterns, so it’s hard to tell when you’re getting search engine hits and when it’s AI traffic.
402 has also begun to be useful, and the head of Stripe says he sees 402 pages taking the place of checkout pages in the coming years, and stablecoins taking the place of other forms of payment, and Stripe is working towards that future.
You also have parts of the web that use adblockers like Pi-hole, which block ads, all the way up to outright poisoning the data collected by the ad networks.
On the other side of it, you have sites that are hostile to adblock, with Google doing its best to choke it out. Websites also have paywalls and subscriptions. They charge $5 to $20 a month, are in my opinion not worth that much, and hark back to a time of print publications.
My solution is microtransactions via 402 and stablecoins. Google’s YouTube profits about $0.60 a month off users. Add in overhead and creator payments, and that runs about $1.80 a month? Which works out to $0.06 a day. I’m mostly pulling this out of my ass, but I’d guess it’s not too far off the mark. I know CPM for ads is pitiful, and clicks are not much better. My guess: the average user burns through maybe $0.50 a day in actual ad revenue, or $15 a month.
If I could load up my browser with stablecoin, then go to the sites I want to go to ad-free! Or, say I don’t mind ads, and I’m broke or don’t care: I get a site for free, and put up with ads. Maybe there is a version where you’re willing to be bombarded with ads, and they pay you to surf their site. I, as a user, get to decide how I use and pay for the web, and I’m no longer the product, but the customer.
You will need to have an agent with a spend budget, and lots of behind-the-scenes fraud security, but it could solve a major issue in the internet world: the need for information, and the need to pay for the information. I think Stripe has the technical chops. You’d need buy-in from browsers and sites, and by default ad mode works without buy-in from the consumer. But as more browsing, search, etc. shifts to agentic AI, this allows everyone to get paid and get what they want.
rasp1.com · also me: jasondpike.com