Whilst I was walking my this morning, I was listening to a really insightful episode of the Exponential View podcast by Azeem Azhar, in this episode he was interviewing Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudfare. You may not be familiar with the name, but Cloudfare is one of the integral companies that runs the backbone of the internet, they serve a huge amount of the content that you see on websites while you browse the internet, so when Matthew speaks, its worth listening.
In the podcast Azeem explored what he calls “a rare chance to redesign the internet.” The premise is: the advertising-driven web is dying, AI agents are fundamentally changing how we consume content, and we have an opportunity to build something better.
I wish I shared that optimism.
Having previously written about how LLMs are degrading our collective knowledge bases, I see a parallel crisis emerging in creator economics. The incentive structures that once motivated people to create and share knowledge online are collapsing; and whilst there’s talk of new business models and content scarcity as solutions, I fear we’re sleepwalking into a Spotify-style catastrophe, where only the largest creators survive and everyone else subsists on scraps.
The Currency of the Web Is Already Dead
The discussion rightly identifies that the advertising model underpinning the web is fundamentally broken. AI agents don’t see ads, they don’t click through to websites, and they certainly don’t generate the engagement metrics that advertisers pay for. Google’s traffic monopoly is reaching its inflection point, not because of antitrust pressure, but because the very nature of information consumption is changing.
But here’s what concerns me: we’re treating this as a future problem when it’s already happened. Content creators aren’t waiting for the formal death announcement; they’re already experiencing the collapse. Traffic is declining, ad revenues are plummeting, and the ROI on creating quality content has become increasingly difficult to justify.
Just as developers stopped contributing to StackOverflow because ChatGPT provided easier answers, content creators across every domain are facing the same calculation: why invest hours creating detailed, researched content when AI can summarise it in seconds for users who never visit your site?
The False Promise of New Business Models
The podcast explores several potential solutions: content scarcity, new pricing models and market-based mechanisms. These sound promising in theory, but they all share a fatal flaw; they assume we can architect a fair distribution system before the current one completely implodes.
We won’t.
The transition period between “broken advertising model” and “functional new model” will be catastrophic for the vast majority of creators. And history suggests the new model won’t be particularly fair anyway.
The Spotify Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss
Spotify revolutionised music distribution and is often cited as a success story for the creator economy. But for whom, exactly?
The platform has created a winner-takes-all dynamic where:
- The top 1% of artists capture the overwhelming majority of streams and revenue
- Mid-tier artists struggle to earn a living wage from streaming alone
- Smaller artists essentially provide free content to fill out the platform’s catalogue whilst generating negligible income
The per-stream payment model sounds equitable; you get paid for what people listen to. But in practice, it concentrates wealth at the top whilst creating an illusion of opportunity for everyone else. The average artist on Spotify earns somewhere between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. To earn minimum wage, you need millions of streams per month. For most creators, this is an impossible threshold.
Now imagine applying this model to written content, video creators, educators, and knowledge sharers. The dynamics don’t improve; they worsen. At least with music, people revisit their favourite songs. Written content is typically consumed once. The long tail becomes even longer, and the head becomes even more concentrated.
We’re Not Preparing for the Collapse
My biggest concern is that we’re having these conversations about redesigning the internet whilst the current internet is actively collapsing. The incentives to create are disappearing right now. The experts who once answered questions on forums, wrote detailed blog posts, or created educational content are making rational economic decisions to stop.
And once they stop, once those network effects disappear, it’s extraordinarily difficult to rebuild them. You can’t simply flip a switch and launch a new monetisation model that magically brings everyone back. The community dissolves, the knowledge base degrades, and we enter what I’ve previously called a potential digital dark age.
The proposals being discussed;innovative pricing models, content licensing schemes; these all require time to develop, test, and scale. We don’t have that time. The collapse is happening now, and every month that passes without viable alternatives sees more creators exit the ecosystem.
What Actually Needs to Happen
If we’re serious about avoiding a catastrophe, we need to confront some uncomfortable realities right now:
AI companies need to be held accountable for the value they extract from creators. If your model is trained on millions of articles, Stack Overflow answers, and blog posts, you have a responsibility to ensure those creators can continue to exist. Licensing deals with major publishers aren’t sufficient; we need systems that distribute value to the long tail.
Any new model must be designed explicitly to prevent winner-takes-all dynamics. This means progressive pricing structures, preferential treatment for smaller creators, and mechanisms that actively redistribute value from the head to the tail. The market won’t do this naturally; it requires intentional design and probably regulatory intervention.
A Redesign or a Collapse?
Azeem Azhar frames this moment as a rare chance to redesign the internet. I want to believe that framing. I want to believe we’ll seize this opportunity to build something more equitable, more sustainable, and more supportive of diverse voices.
But I’m a sceptic. History suggests that periods of disruption concentrate power rather than distributing it. The platforms that emerge from this transition will likely replicate or worsen existing inequalities, not solve them.
The currency of the web isn’t just dying. It’s already dead for most creators. The question isn’t whether we can redesign the internet; it’s whether we’ll do it fast enough to matter, and whether we have the courage to design it in a way that actually serves creators rather than platforms.
I’m not holding my breath.
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