A New Internet Business Model?

Am not an expert at Spotify, but for at least the musicians i know, they self-publish these days, so it's really not about the labels. For us, Spotify is just another way of getting our music out there. Yeah, we can build a very small audience who'll follow our music, but more over, it's just a way to point interested producers, venues, musicians or listeners to our music.

And actually Spotify hasn't been profitable until 2024. It seems like the problem is streaming music is not a great business model. They pay a tons to labels and (big name) artists, but only get a set subscription fee from its listeners.

It's a the lesser of two evils, because without it, people would go back to bittorrenting music or using things like the Apple Store, where you don't have to buy an entire album, you can just buy only the songs you like for a couple bucks.

I like that they are considering this problem. I really dont like what they have decided to focus on. Having 'answer engines' as the core with content creators filling in the gaps like some sort of task rabbit workers sounds horrible. I dont want gaps filled by people who are doing it for money. I want people that actually care enough to organically create the content.

The problem isnt oh no people wont be viewing ads and thus creators wont get paid. The problem is "why arent people who view these websites willing to pay?". So many subscriptions are like $5 a month but if we consider how much a creator is paid for showing you an ad its like 0.0005 cents. I'd rather pay that everytime i view a page than look at ads or have cloudflare pay people to create the content openAI thinks I want.

Funding the content we consume should be cheap considering how many people are there consuming it and how cheap it is these days to serve content.

using conventional methods small transactions are eaten by service fees. This means microtransactions require a different way to pay which is friction and people are apathetic especially when what're you doing is trying to get them to pay for things.

Unfortunately ads and tracking go hand in hand: without tracking, targeted ads are much less effective. If everything else stays the same, you'll just get more, bigger, and flashing ads to compensate for the inefficiency, like what you see today on smaller sites without sophisticated user data.

Big News : company who'se competition makes money from traffic thinks traffic should be free

I'm always fascinated by companies capacity to make deregulation the answer to every problem, included deregulation. Neoliberalism never fails to make me cringe, the idea that any value comes as a direct consequence of the business model is not surprising coming from tech companies but still.

> So how will the business model work? [...] Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating [...] but instead rewards those content creators [...]. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators ...

This isn't revolutionary and won't remove the biggest issues with the internet, This is basically how youtube remunerates content creators, that counts AI using your data as a "view" or remunerable unit of consumption.

AI companies will never agree to remunerate anyone without a fight. They spent billions on their AI models and want ROI.

Remember how youtube demonetises content with not 'advertiser friendly' content ? is that how the whole internet works now ? can i get removed from the internet if Trump affiliated CEOs hate me ?

> Our conversations with the leading AI companies nearly all acknowledge that they have a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and compensate content creators. Confirming this, the largest publishers are reporting they're having much more constructive conversations about licensing their content to those AI companies.

So, pretty transparently, you make content, that content is owned by a publisher, that publisher gives that content to an AI company, the AI company pays back the publisher (how things already work so far), and then the publisher aggrees to give some of it back to the creators. How does cloudflare plan to promise this ? they mention "collaboration" so non binding agreements, as i assume OpenAI won't agree to pay fines to cloudflare for not paying you the 20 bucks you think you deserve for your content.

At no point do they even entertain the idea that you should be remunerated based on how often AI serves your content, or that this remuneration should be mendatory.

This letter would create incredible opportunities for censorship and abuse. Just a few days after Trump makes companies pull Jimmy and Stephen, Cloudflare propose a new internet, controlled by them, centralized in america, where Trump, or any future president could just order Wikipedia to be removed or demonetized. No thanks