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AI Businesses The Internet

Cloudflare CEO: AI Is Killing the Business Model of the Web 35

Posted by BeauHD from the value-exchange dept.
In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse -- calling most current AI investment a "money fire" with only a small fraction holding long-term value. Search Engine Land reports: Google's value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: "Ten years ago... for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. ... That was the trade. ... Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor." That drop reflects the rise of zero-click searches, which happen when searchers get answers directly on Google's search page. "Today, 75 percent of the queries... get answered without you leaving Google." This trend, long criticized by publishers and SEOs, is part of a broader concern: AI companies are using original content to generate answers that rarely/never drive traffic back to creators.

AI makes the problem worse. Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the crisis, Prince said. AI companies scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has -- with even less return to creators. "What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one." "More and more the answers... won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source." This situation threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it, Prince said: "If content creators can't derive value... then they're not going to create original content."

The modern web is breaking. AI companies are aware of the problem, and the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, Prince said: "Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But... he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free." Cloudflare's right in the middle of this problem -- it powers 80% of AI companies and a 20-30% of the web. Cloudfaire is now trying to figure out how to help fix what's broken, Prince said. AI = money fire. Prince is not against AI. However, he said he is skeptical of the investment frenzy. "I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable." "And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that $1 that matters." You can watch a recording of the interview and read the full transcript here.

Cloudflare CEO: AI Is Killing the Business Model of the Web More | Reply

Cloudflare CEO: AI Is Killing the Business Model of the Web

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  • He's just upset that it may mean less traffic, which means less his company can charge for transfer fees.

    • If I create a website with content and the AI bots just scrap it all and feed it back to a user directly from the search page, it's basically stealing the website's content without providing the traffic.

      The user never ends up on your site yet they got the information they needed. That hardly encourages people to create websites and content if they get no traffic and can't generate enough revenue to cover the operation of the site.

      • Let's be real, that was killed long ago with the invention of ad-blockers. Nearly no website was paying the bills with just website views.

  • Oh well, sucks to be SEO! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RamenMan ( 7301402 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @06:19PM (#65362533)

    So maybe the web will return to more of the state it was in back before 2000.

    Back before every website was filled with ads. Before everything was paywalled.

    I am very happy to get my AI answers rather than going to a site with pop-ups, ads, and a paywall. But I will gladly visit a site that is designed for USERS rather than advertisers.

    Cloudflare makes money by serving companies that have enshittified the web. If they all go away, and the web goes back to a place where people create content designed for users, I am all for it.

    Does anyone have any sympathy for the decline of the enshittified, google-ified, ad-supported web?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      So maybe the web will return to more of the state it was in back before 2000.

      Back before every website was filled with ads.

      It would be nice, but it's far, far more likely that the web will become - literally - nothing but ads cleverly (not) disguised as "content."

    • Wait, you don't want to look at ads and your bitching about paywalls. You clearly have zero interest in paying for content of any sort. How do you possibly think someone can keep a popular blog or hobby site going if they have to pay for everything out of pocket?

      It all cost money to provide you with "free" content.

      • I have a decent site on Squarespace- it costs about $16 per month. Totally ad-free. $16 is a reasonable price to cover all the costs involved. Once upon a time I had a server at a colo facility which cost a lot more, so the $16/month is fine.

        Having a small fee to push my content out the world makes sense.

        But if this ruins Buzzfeed, because people stop clicking on their articles due to AI telling them the 'one small trick', then I am all for it.

        • But how do you make enough money from your site visitors to pay that $16/month? Or enough money to actually pay for rent and food and the supplies to make more content? You're giving your content away for free. That's lovely, and I'm glad you have enough money to do that, but most people need to make a living. If content creation is only something that can be done as a hobby on the side, we lose a huge percent of the ecosystem, including all of journalism. Paywalls or advertising -- pick one or the other.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      But I will gladly visit a site that is designed for USERS rather than advertisers.

      Sure, but Google never sends traffic to such a site, so what's the incentive to create it in the first place?

      Don't get me wrong... I'd love to see the ad-supported web go away. But how do we support web sites, then? Subscription fees? Micro-payments? We need to solve that problem to kill the surveillance-capitalism ad-infested mess that is most of today's web.

      • I'm for micro payments. Without a little friction, look how email went. The unit cost can be zero if you get your bots from multiple IPs to sign up for anything free, and blast away from there. So even nominal direct costs would likely nullify many current malicious spam business models. Same with micro payments for sniffing around a website ?

  • This business model was already dying (Score:3)

    by computer_tot ( 5285731 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @06:24PM (#65362549)
    Between search engines offering previews of summaries and social media showing the headlines and the first paragraph of stories, Cloudflare's CEO is about a decade too late to this realization. The content-creation business model of the web has been dying for over a decade. AI summarizes are just one more nail in the coffin.

    • The content-creation business model of the web has been dying for over a decade.

      The *ad-supported, free-to-read* content creation business model is dying. Paywalled content that attracted subscribers today will still attract them tomorrow.
      People who subscribe big news outlets won't cancel because ChatGPT can answer things like "who's the new Pope" or "what happened today in $my_city".

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Yea, I feel like this disproportionately affects content farms which seems like a net positive as they're part of why search sucks.
    • Sounds to me like the walled garden model is failing. I like this.

  • Google gives sources (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday May 08, 2025 @06:29PM (#65362565) Homepage Journal

    As crap as Google's AI search results are, and they very much are crap as they often give completely nonsensical answers which do not make sense on any level, they absolutely do point to sources. I know because I read those sources, which often prove that Gemini is hallucinating.

    Anyone with a brain would read the provided links to find out if they said what Gemini says they said, because they often do not. If this is decreasing traffic significantly then it's proof positive that most people are stupid. That, of course, would not be news.

    But should we be trying to protect business models which depend on people being smart? They are bound to fail eventually.

  • I search for some morsel of information, like an exchange rate or elevation of a place or whatever. Then each results either obscures the data with paragraphs of repetitive word salad, in the end not having anything relevant to the query. Google destroyed the utility of their search engine for the sake of monetizing everything. The same will happen to "AI".

    • I actually started paying for an AI service.

      Not because I'm a heavy user, or that I rely on it. But because I would rather that they have a subscription model, than an ad-supported model.

      I'd rather pay $20 a month for a service designed around my needs, than get a service for free that is designed around advertisers.

      In the whole, "If you get a product for free, then you are the product" way of thinking, I would much rather pay for a service I use, rather than being used by people who are serving me ads for

      • I would much rather pay for a service I use, rather than being used by people who are serving me ads for free.

        So you're subscribing a product that does not have a free tier? (and swears to the great gods no ads ever involved) Otherwise they'll deploy the ad-based version to you anyway, your subscription is for faster answers / more queries.

        If you have to spend $20 to support a business model, you could also choose $local_news, for them $20 is a quantifiable difference and they might even listen to feedback you send them. OTOH giving away $20 to a $AI_megacorp won't influence them at all. They'll do whatever earn th

  • The web is a cesspool of irrelevant screaming garbage, we won't miss, but where will Sam and the boys get their precious data?

    Will this trigger model collapse?

    • The work of previous generation achieved Wikipedia. It already summarizes a significant chunk of human knowledge, an archive version taken today it can be useful 100 years as it is and will only lack data related to future events.
      The work of this generation will be to achieve a AI models that we'll be able to archive and use forever when training new models will stop working, or the money dries up.
      In the same vein, when 100 TB drives become available and affordable, then we'll be able to achieve preservatio

  • I know people know this, but we seem to forget. The web is not free. We pay for it whenever we buy an advertised product whether we see the ad or not. If the web stops working because no one sees the ads, then advertisers will find another way to sell us their product. That may cost us more or less than the current web advertising model. But whatever the cost, we will pay for it when we buy the product.

    That said, I think the web would be more valuable to us if it weren't for the advertising revenue model. G

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      I subscribe to a few sites. LWN [lwn.net], The Globe and Mail [theglobeandmail.com], The Beaverton [thebeaverton.com] and Macleans [macleans.ca]

      But those are rare sites with really good content. I don't think it would be a terrible thing if the number of web sites that make their living off of content dropped by a factor of 1000, so only those with high-enough quality to attract subscribers survived. We'd then have the quality subscription sites and the labor-of-love hobby sites that aren't trying to make money (and hence don't fling ads in your face) and the Web wou

  • The internet was a better place when websites were for fun, rather than for profit.

    He is not talking about e-commerce dying out. He is talking about the death of profit-by-abusive-advertising, Search Engine Optimization (any term you enter leads you to this fake site so we can sell advertising clicks), and tracking-you-and-selling-the-data-for-profit dying out as a model.

    Let it burn.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      Seconded, with the proviso that there's still room for high-quality content that you have to pay a subscription fee to see.

      • Oh, yes.

        I used to pay subscriptions to sites I was involved with. I would rather have most content be hobby level and free, with specialty/high-quality sites as pay-to-join than all of this tracking and advertising supported spammy shit we have now.

    • Wellll... when you put it like that ... yesssss.... haha... I see what you mean.. <still chuckling>... but your right about that one .. its perversely commercial now
  • I like the idea of a Basic Attention Token that can be sold and bought. Each site visit can result in a transfer of a slice of your daily attention token to the site owner. And you can _receive_ tokens by watching ads in turn.

    But this has to work globally and _without_ any whiff of cryptoshit. So it's not happening.

  • Wasn't originally built with the intention of it becoming a " business model " in the first place.

    The fact that it ultimately became one is what screwed it all up.

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