161–170 of 218 posts
This is the old "blockchains will create new niches for creators" / "rent-seeking is Good Actually" argument, barely reheated. Total imagination bankruptcy from C-suite.
Everyone seems to be dismissing this without reading it. As a content publisher, I am very interested in any proposal that results in me getting residual payments from AI scrapers. That would indeed be a new internet business model. This is also being attempted by RSL with their “Crawler Authentication Protocol” ( https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers ) for demanding proof of licensing from scrapers and RSL Coll…
As an engineer who works at a medium-large publishing company, am also interested in this direction. I have fully read Cloudflare's proposal, as I have RSL, and L402. In its current state, RSL is not a full solution, but can be. The spec does not cover payments. Its basically just a new token type, which crawlers would register for to crawl your content, and predefined responses for more detailed states. But nothing…
https://iabtechlab.com/announcing-content-monetization-proto...
Maybe people have agendas, or maybe they have different perspectives that should be reconciled?
Everyone seems to be dismissing this without reading it. As a content publisher, I am very interested in any proposal that results in me getting residual payments from AI scrapers. That would indeed be a new internet business model. This is also being attempted by RSL with their “Crawler Authentication Protocol” ( https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers ) for demanding proof of licensing from scrapers and RSL Coll…
It always bothers me a little when people describe themselves as a content publisher or content creator. Why content? Why not say you are a short film maker or writer or musician or videographer or journalist or painter or photographer or ...?
In the past, your work has been merely content to the people who are looking for bits -- any bits -- to place between and around the stuff they really care about: ads. These days I suppose your work may be seen by some as grist for the AI mill.
By calling your work content you are acceding to the idea that your work is only valuable in other contexts. It isn't! I bet it's something you made with care and thought.
Or maybe I misread and you really are a content publisher. You're the person running the CMS who is looking for other people's work to monetize. If so, nevermind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How would that work short of them buying most of the fiber in the world? Did Google need that to dominate search?
No, and they didn’t have a natural monopoly there either.
https://www.promarket.org/2017/05/09/google-close-natural-mo...
> As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small. Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the…
Also weird for their shining example to be Reddit. Where the actual creators there would not get a dime, presumably
> As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small. Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the…
> The "level playing field" rhetoric reminds me so much of Apple talking about the App Store. To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store. Think about all people employed to work on mobile apps, all those people going to local taco truck for lunch owned by an immigrant, that immigrant buying a nice christmas present for their kid, etc.
This sentence is missing something essential:
Many billion dollar businesses have been built for iPhone and distributed by the app store.
iPhone is the platform, whereas App Store is merely the exclusive method of software distribution as dictated by Apple. Contrast with the Apple Mac, where the App Store is not the exclusive method of software distribution.
In short: we'll have the machines tell the creators what to create. > You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms th…
> As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small. Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the…
> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare. Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.
"Let's give money to the content creators" is exactly what big incumbents want. They want to farm you, the viewer, for big profits, and give the content creators a few pennies in return. Meanwhile they hoover up the lion's share of the profit. We've seen this over and over again. It's rent-seeking. "Content creators" are part of the problem. Generating endless "content", which isn't very useful or valuable, and creat…
On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.
As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.
And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).
Imagine a future where:
The Internet rewards passionate creators more than instrumental alpha-seekers. This is key. But how?
We publish everything for free under reciprocal licenses like the AGPL and CC-BY-SA, not permissive licenses like the MIT and CC-BY. Those who take from the pile must add to it, or at least not claim it as exclusively their own.
Creators are rewarded by the populace via direct payments, like how streamers are rewarded. People decide what's valuable and what's slop, not Big Brother.
This creates an incentive structure where:
Those who make software and content because they love it will have more resources to make more quality stuff.
Those who make software and content for the money but actually hate what they do will find something else to do because companies will pay them less.
There are two necessary conditions that must be met, that we can work on right now:
We recognize artificial scarcity as evil, so we can enforce reciprocal licenses socially and bypass the broken legal apparatus.
We use multiple competing payment platforms to pay creators and receive payments, so there is incentive for these platforms to get better.