To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model
(www.economist.com)
from MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Jul 23:43
https://lemmy.zip/post/44391147
from MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Jul 23:43
https://lemmy.zip/post/44391147
Link without the paywall
threaded - newest
I liked the web a lot more when it didn’t have a business model.
YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!
remember when we met people from around the globe and it was fun instead of frustrating?
I’m still fucking ashamed, I was 9 and me and my sis had an ICQ friend. He was the same age as our IRL friend, had the same name, except it was a different guy someplace in Germany. Yet somehow the friendship a bit transcended that little nuance.
And I wrote such horribly idiotic stuff.
And that was back when hosting, storage, and bandwidth were expensive. Those are basically free for text-based content now, and getting cheaper for audio and video. Nowadays, anything made by amateurs shouldn’t really need a “business model” at all, and anything made by professionals could be damned cheap, if there were no middlemen taking the majority of the cut.
Such bullshit.
"AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money."
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
Not op, but I pay for my own server, domain and IP (though it is not a static one). And I’ve donated to some of the fediverse platforms that I use, like lemmy.world.
I’m not sure what you are trying to get at?
So what’s your public facing site address and we’ll see how we’ll it can hold against the onslaught on the net. You gonna pay to host all the YouTube videos too. Do you host instances for thousands of others to mess with. What SaaS offerings does your site present. If you’re not sure what my point is you’re not informed enough to present a legitimate argument.
We already pay for this through the time theft and involuntary brainwashing known as “ads”. It’s a very dumb and wasteful way to pay for a shitty product. But that’s capitalism as usual.
lol. The internet doesn’t run on marketing buzzwords. Grow up.
fyi, the way you write seems like you are upset over something. It’s somewhat odd to write that on a website that is hosted by volunteers on a shoestring budget for thousands of users “against the onslaught on the net.” So you better understand, anything besides youtube videos (i.e., the majority of the content on the net) is fairly economical to host. Of course it depends on the system, but a small group can easily stand up something dynamic like a lemmy instance, and an individual can host their static blog for basically free -open to the wide internet. Youtube is hard because video uses an incredible amount of bandwidth. Google looses money on it, despite it being plastered with advertising. So even capitalism hasn’t figured out how to do it yet without being subsidized by another revenue stream.
Just random people with their own money. Basic webhosting is cheaper than a netflix subscription.
AI as a technology at its core is fine, what is at issue here is the unnecessary scaling up of AI. There were great strides being made in making models as small and efficient as possible before OpenAI fucked up the entire market by becoming a for-profit company. They literally can’t scale the models much further no matter how much data and compute they throw at them nowadays, and the money faucet still hasn’t been turned off to disastrous consequences.
Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.
With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.
Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.
See, that’s a reasonable take I agree with for the most part, but I think it’ll play out a bit differently. Because these AIbro Technofascist dipshit Billionaires are so fucking stupid, instead of just pulling the plug on AI and sitting on the wealth of information like metaphorical dragons, they’ll continue pumping billions into larger and more complex models to try and “automate everything”, all the while fighting each other viciously, until they all run out of money when their AI-Powered techno-utopia where autonomous robots run everything never comes to pass.
Meanwhile, instead of paying for the information hoards of the TechnoFascist Elites, people will begin self-hosting again, like with the Fediverse, because it’s just simply cheaper and more effective at letting people learn as groups and connect with each other.
On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.
On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.
This is part of why it’s so important that people keep information completely free. (aka piracy).
Yes.
Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.
Don’t put AI in anything and everything because it’s the new .com. That’s the business model that will work
Did you read the article? The part of the web that is having problems with their business model are the sites that are not using AI. They're sites like news pages, the "sources" for information on the web. The ones that are eating their lunch are the ones that are using AI. They're the search engines and similar sites that people go to looking for information. Since AI is able to gather the information from those sources and present it to the user without the user having to actually visit that site, that undermines their existing business model.
I read the article and it conveniently glosses over the fact that this will be a problem in the fairly near future for those who are using AI because the use of AI keeps a person on the page longer but doesn’t generally encourage them to view ads or actually click through to products or services. Those business are ad aggregation companies by default for the most part, and they aren’t gonna to survive without clickthroughs, not can the survive off ad revenue that doesn’t exist because people aren’t looking at the ads or clicking through to the products. The AI summary is the same problem that they already gave themselves once when they were trying to make search results more efficient in like 2018. You’d Google, and they would answer the query without you having to click a link at all. You’d get your answer and close the page.
Also, once they’ve starved themselves of user created data (as is posited by the article), they won’t have anything to keep feeding these models.
Yes, this is it exactly. The web pages that depend on ad revenue are the ones in trouble here. They're being undercut by pages that give people the information they want without going through all that stuff.
You're confidently predicting that the AI summarizers are going to fail somehow, and then everything will just magically go back to the way they were. I suppose that's a reassuring thing to believe. Why should I believe it, though? The AI genie is out of the bottle. I can run one locally on my computer if I want. All the existing online summarizers could go bankrupt tomorrow and I'll still be able to get an AI to distill the information I want from the morass of ads and engagement-harvesting click farms.
This is me quoting my own comments on this article from another post on Lemmy:
I don’t like the way this article is written. There are concepts that it tries to convey that have major caveats it glosses over. Additionally it posits some ideas for alternatives that aren’t new currencies and doesn’t explain how most of them would work. It also seems to ignore the fact that content creators very often get paid in ad revenue by the very same companies that are exacerbating this problem with their GenAI models, as well as companies that are being hit hard by the lack of actual ad generated revenue due to loss of clickthroughs and impressions.
That being said it does actually somewhat explain a lot of the problem with the internet being sustained via ad revenue and ads.
Several of the companies who’s business model is built around ad aggregation are either investing in or developing/have launched GenAI products that are in opposition with their current business model.
They seem content at the moment to starve other places on the internet of the very ad revenue they rely on to make money. This will hurt them in the long run but they are focused on the short term profits they will make in the meantime and they do not seem concerned about the future so long as they can be seen to be on the cutting edge of the new technology.
I don’t really know if this will lead to a downturn in creator made content. A lot of paid creators are so invested in that eco system that they’d rather hop from one service to the next forever than give it up and go get a 9-5.
The pay as you crawl system is going to be difficult to implement, especially when crawlers already ignore the .txt file. The startups are not in a position to necessarily pay to license data and I question if they’d be able to pay as they crawl either. Meaning there will be big conglomerate gate keepers like Meta and Google and MS. The pay as you crawl system also only works if it’s regulated in some way so that normal users and small creators don’t get caught up in being victimized by bots/crawlers ignoring such rules or laws, with those victims unable to have their case taken seriously or heard at all.
As for determining where the information came from and providing attribution. Most people still aren’t going to click through to those pages. This is in part because a lot of them don’t want to see ads in the first place (for security reasons and because ads are an imposition on their increasingly limited time, energy, and attention). It’s also because they already have the information they need. You don’t care if Wikipedia gets your ad revenue so long as you can prove you were right about Brad Pitt’s height or his first job to your friend you made that bet with at the bar last night.
They say sources would be compensated. By who? And how? We have already established that people don’t think there’s a lot of value in paying for chatbots. The vast majority of Gen AI LLM users have shown (through polling, and introductory costs that go up in price later) that they aren’t interested in and don’t find value in pay for them. So conglomerates (many of whom run chatbots at a loss) would be on the hook both for paying for their crawlers and for providing such services to their consumers (corporate or not)? That most definitely is not sustainable.
The other option is licensing but a lot of data has already been crawled and continues to be crawled without licensing or compensation.
I’m not sure that changing this business model will lead to anything good.
Edit: There’s also the problem with DDOS attacks for smaller websites that get crawled. Lemmy has seen this first hand. It’s not the intention of the crawlers to overload the servers but there’s so many of them and the number keeps growing. There’s a whole lot of other issues besides the ones in this comment too.
The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.
To survive the AI age we will need a completely different capitalism model - which I honestly think will happen, but the transition period is guaranteed to be extremely difficult.
Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I’m sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.
There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.
And then the new meta instead of making you scroll through a million ads to get to the content it will make you go to page 2 then 3 then 4… to get to the content to get many more cents XD
But yea i do agree that if the websites aked us to pay the same amount that they get from ads to not see them it would cost us a fraction of a penny. Just needs some kind of wallet that either the website or ad provider can take from to delete the ads.
Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.
I literally sent a message to google in the ads part of my google account since google is one of the biggest ad provider, about a wallet that would pay automatically to not see the ads. Idk if anyone reads these messages there XD
unfortunately google gains a lot more from getting our data and selling us as potential clients to businesses and would most likely not want to get on that.
Maybe paypal wich already have wallets and widespread addoption could try to replace ads provider.
This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?
Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days
NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.
Not a perfect idea but not the worst?
There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
This is closer to the idea: www.w3.org/TR/…/WD-Micropayment-Markup-19990825/
Don’t you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.
Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I’m happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.
You don’t pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.
So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.
Or to buy storage.
There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.
It should be a client-side decision to “continue to a paid service for N monies”.
People who’ve built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy’s interview on climate and externalia). They didn’t consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.
That’s an intermediate version of what I’m dreaming of, except what I’m dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.
That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you're OK with that, but business models like that are partly what's wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who's relatively rich and who's relatively poor in the wrong direction.
Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn't.
The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We'd be lucky if it was a dollar.
There's also the question of what constitutes "a page". What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn't load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?
Data caps and charges would be the "better" way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who's on a plan that has those, that they're awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.
Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don’t want to pay for more of it.
I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.
Actually, given Lemmy’s usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren’t thinking through this proposal.
You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.
Kagi’s model is working well for them. A traditional search engine where AI results are limited and optional, and they actively try to filter away slop, images, clickbait, and other low quality results.
I’ve been paying for 3 months and I’ll never go back. I hope they increase their market share as others ratchet up their enshittification cranks.
I should get into the model business
I loved the idea of Flattr.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
For a publication based entirely on brainwashed capitalist pseudo-science… every problem is solved by more capitalism.
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As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it’s regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it’s citizens in a “safe” and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it’s content. I’m not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be ‘free’ market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I’ll let others drive down that hole.