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The decades-old doctrine of “Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl” is over, writes Fred Vogelstein in his latest feature for our newsletter, Crazy StupidTech, and as a result, the Internet in the age of AI will be filled with much-needed “tolls.” This change has come quickly.
“Google essentially invented the business of crawling in exchange for monetizable traffic a generation ago with Adwords,” writes Fred. “It remains the source of its dominance today. And it has been an essential fuel for the growth of the $16 trillion global internet economy.“
The writing’s been on the wall since ChatGPT launched, but nobody wanted to read it. We’re watching the great traffic heist in real-time. “Not only are more and more searches going through AI chatbots that generate zero traffic for publishers,” Fred writes, “Google itself is now sending publishers less traffic. Instead, Google is increasingly choosing to use its own AI product Gemini to respond to queries as a way of competing with the chatbots.”
In other words, AI chatbots are swallowing searches whole, while Google is playing both sides with Gemini. Don’t ignore the fact that this is a big challenge to how Google makes money. But it has deep pockets. Established media is living on fumes. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity.
Tollbit is the first to capitalize on this. But as Fred points out, Cloudflare and Matthew Prince are cooking up something new and will give @TollbitOfficial some competition and a boost.
I have been talking about this for a very long time, but the establishment media is always the last to realize their own existential threats. Just as they were slow to recognize the emergence of blogs, social media, and how Facebook was a chimera, they have been slow to realize that the old “destination internet” as a behavioural construct is over.
The addiction to traffic and impressions-based advertising has been an Achilles’ heel of the media establishment. It is hard for them to look at the world through the lens of engagement. The rise of “chat-based” informational interfaces is yet another victory for engagement-trumps-all doctrine.
To get a better understanding of this, feel free to dig into the archives of our CrazyStupidTech newsletter. If you like what you read, please subscribe. It is free. But before you do all that, read Fred’s piece. It is very good.
