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Cloudflare CEO: AI Is Killing the Business Model of the Web 76

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.

        • But at least you got traffic, and visitors occasionally decide to spend money on your goods and services.

  • Oh well, sucks to be SEO! (Score:5, 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."

      • 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."

        And if you think about it, part of the reason for doing just that would be to reach the ultimate goal of having your advertising on a site spit out the other side of AI that crawled your pages, so that AI is the one broadcasting your advertising to a wider audience.

        AI is very naive, it seems like it could be tricked this way, using similar approaches that people take t

    • 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.

          • Yeah, people need to make a living, but they can live with doing something else than spammy websites.

            I don't think the initial complaint was about everything ads, but about intrusive ads.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          How would Slashdot survive in this new world? Subscriptions were abandoned because they just weren't worth the hassle of managing for the tiny amount of income they provided. Ads are the only revenue stream at the moment.

    • 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 ?
      • It's not about supporting them with money, the old web wasn't for-profit, but there's no point in writing something if no one's ever going to read it. "Supporting them" means visiting their website.

        Except the bots ruin this too, for the reason given in the summary. So this isn't going to get us back to the old web, instead it will likely drive us even further into the walled gardens.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Slayer ( 6656 )

        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.

        Your question is valid, and the supposed answer was "web3 will provide the infrastructure for funding this type of content". It still doesn't perform this task, since most people loath the idea of paying for content now, many techies hate crypto bros, and many crypto bros are an unpleasant brand of their own. Either way, the basic underlying technology is all there and is proven to work.

    • 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.

      And before most people had an Internet connection at home faster than the 0.05 Mbps of v.90 dial-up. If you exclude ad-supported and subscription websites, you end up with mostly websites operated as a hobby. I'm not confident that having only hobby sites around will sustain a market for home broadband Internet access.

    • This. The current business model of most websites is defective, it deserves to be killed.

    • I used to have a hobby website like this. It wasn't designed to get clicks, it was built to teach myself HTML (in Notepad) and to put information out to others. If no one visited, I didn't care - it was about giving knowledge away freely, the same as when people would ask me IRL. I fondly remember Geocities and stuff from back then, when searching for information was actually a fun evening, rather than spending time to find a way to block a new form of intrusive ad.
    • Seriously? 2002 Called and wants is rant back. I'll bet half the readers here are green, the don't even know what "Punch The Monkey" even means.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Unfortunately the adoption of things like the UK Online Safety laws, while (at least ostensibly) well meant, means returning to the old ways isn't viable. I could no longer host a small forum for instance, as I'd need people's real names and identities for age verification and I'd also need to be actively policing the forum to some sort of legal SLA for taking down content. Having those names also brings in GDPR....naah, I'm out.

      Years back I ran a very small web hosting business that existed primarily ju

  • 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:This business model was already dying (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @06:41PM (#65362593)
        Yea, I feel like this disproportionately affects content farms which seems like a net positive as they're part of why search sucks.

        • Indeed. The paper I subscribe to, which also gives me access to the NY Times now, doesn't give any content away for free. Good luck scraping their site, they only allow AI to get the headline and intro.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Yea, I feel like this disproportionately affects content farms which seems like a net positive as they're part of why search sucks.

          Yep, what's killing the "internet" is 100 different content farms just repeating the same thing over and over again, jostling to be higher up in Google.

          And by "internet" I mean the notion that you're owed a living by producing minimal content... let alone owed one forever and a day. You want to make money out of something you produce, put some effort into it.

    • 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.

    • Wouldn't search traffic go up if the results are worse? Giving you the answer up front diminishes your value and therefore incentive to give you what you want on the first try.

      • Wouldn't search traffic go up if the results are worse?

        It depends on what you're searching for. If they want a technical manual or something, then yeah, people are looking for the very thing. If what they are looking for is an explanation of something they don't understand, or even more terrifying an opinion, then they can't evaluate the quality of the result.

        • haha! so traffic goes up no matter what!
          doesn't it?
          What is the composition of origin of web searches? What even is a web search exactly these days? Does it have to be from a browser or is curl ok? I'm pushing the Dead Internet theory these days, you know, basically most of the traffic is bots. That it. That's all. The internet eats it's young. Soon or now, the WHOLE fucking internet will be/is bots... and your traffic? us, puny humans?... doing very little actual activity, stuff, communicating on the intern

        • I'm using it to find the actual website I need without going through 20 pages of search results. And it's quite good at that, especially in cases where the search team is very common and i need multiple sentences to describe what I want to search for.

          I think more people will use it that way eventually, which will threaten search more than the websites providing actual value.

          Shitty content farms will be having a tough time though.

    • Woah, somebody who reads sources! You probably read Wikipedia sources too! And here I thought those were just to make it look official!

  • 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

      • Wikipedia isn't going anywhere. And those summary summaries that AI provides--links to Wikipedia when it draws from there. If you want the in-depth "summary" that is found on Wikipedia, click that link. If you just want the 5-sentence version, AI does a pretty good job of that. Both types of summaries have a purpose, and both can coexist.

      • hmm. Interesting idea. So if it get this right, youre saying basically that we could use "AI" as a method of storage of information/knowledge. Like an encyclopedia or the holographic Doctor from Star Trek ... I can't recall the series he was in, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I do know his catchphrase, which I recently forgot too... Ok, I'll turn my nerd card in when I leave. <heads out the back door>

  • 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

    • I am not saying I want the web to go back to what it was, but the web functioned fine (and honestly better in some ways) back before it was commercialized. It will also never become uncommercialized, either. But the odds of no one seeing the ads are also roughly nothing.

    • I'm kind of find with this. The pendulum has swung so far into the add-supported mindset, that the sites literally exist only to serve ads, and provide a bit of content as an excuse to attract search engines. If AI kills these, it's all good.

  • Good! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Thursday May 08, 2025 @08:24PM (#65362759) Homepage

    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

    • Agree, but...the advertisers are coming for AI too. It won't take long before the AI bots are as congested with ads, as today's "regular" sites.

    • Like others, I don't know what a workable GOOD solution is. But I do know that the current business model is killing society, politics, and the mental health of our children and ourselves. It's a business model of collecting and selling eyeballs, monetizing attention.

      That doesn't necessarily create all our social problems, but the ones it doesn't create, it certainly does amplify and exploit.
      The current business model needs to die . . .

      --
      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
      slouches toward

  • 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.

  • Well, he's not wrong. The A.I creators claim the Large language models (LLMs) are only trained on the meterial but doesn't store the actual source material. This is disengenious in the extreme.
  • Even if it is AI bots scraping, in reality, through information integration, the crystallized knowledge goes to humans, so - humans by proxy of AI, & AIs.

  • apathetic about threats to the web's economic model. I considered writing a trenchant and insightful post explaining my apathy. Ultimately, I couldn't be bothered to do that. Reorganizing my sock drawer is vastly more important to me than contemplating the fate of online advertising revenue streams.

  • 90% of consumers will... consume AI slop and be happy. The rest will find other pastimes.

    Internet businesses that have something real behind them will obviously thrive. Influencers and other parasites will die.

    Artists will be hard hit indeed, but hey, that's the price of progress.

  • I was always encouraged to verify information and try to get as close as possible to the original source. So perhaps it would be sensible to have a simple (button?) method to list the sources that the AI would have referenced when providing their answers. They might even be ordered by 'relevance'.

  • the 'business model' of the internet was allready doing a good job killing it of most ofits usefullness.

  • ... products and services on you in every moment of the conversation. It's going to suck big time. I'm getting sick just imagining it.

  • This story is significant for the simple fact that only Cloudflare has data that is remotely close to Googles massive data cache. Seriously, think about the rest of the web - there is NOBODY that has the reach that Cloudflare does. Even the huge ISP's are only as good as their own network, where Cloudflare stretches across the entire web.

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