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A New Internet Business Model?

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#201

Post by sceptic123 »

sbarre wrote: post #159
sceptic123 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not saying what you think either, there's no reward system or transfer of value in free content, offered for free. It doesn't matter if it's hosted at someone's own expense if it's done for nothing other than the fun of it.

I never implied there was a reward system or value transfer (unless you count the feel-good reward of sharing knowledge with others and the value of doing so). I said that putting things on the Internet is not, and has never been, "free". And I think that's what Cloudflare is saying too. You're free to interpret it differently (as was OP) but I think you're wrong. ;-)

CloudFlare is definitely implying there's always been a reward systems and value transfer at play, that's there in the quoted text and what the OP is complaining about

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#202

Post by port11 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #66

"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…

While I'm partial to your cynic interpretation — after all Cloudlfare is a for-profit US business —, the model isn't that far from what Jaron Lanier had proposed in ’Who Owns The Future?‘ (2010).

In the book he explains how these micropayments would be sent out to all the websites you visit, etc. And you can have a built-in mechanism to combat the "star system" that tech automatically enables, where a few people get the most money.

Lanier's proposal was that ISPs take charge of this issue, but perhaps Cloudflare can make it work. The less cynical interpretation would be that later they federate the system or even turn into a non-profit.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#203

Post by mg »

inerte wrote: post #110
mg wrote: post #86

ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked Why are micropayments so hard? I wonder how the web would look like if one could click "pay 1 cent to continue". Maybe content would become better? Maybe it would make one think "Hmm... one moment, is this something I want to read or am I just doomscrolling?".

It would like exactly how it is today. It's not hard to find someone not charging anything for the same piece of content, or not charging anything for another type of content that fills the same void.

If HN charged 1 cent per day and you could pay with a simple click, you would not come here anymore?

Where would you go?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#204

Post by RyanHamilton »

velcrovan wrote: post #96
mid-kid wrote: post #87

> Unless you believe that content creators should work for free, or that they are somehow not needed anymore — both of which are naive assumptions Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? From my point of view, most of the highly-valuable information came from the various forums, wikis and personal sites, on all of which people would publish the information for free. Ads were largely used to cover…

> Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? ...Is this really what we want to preserve? Big publications and their interests? They are proposing a scheme by which AI scrapers would have to pay for the content they scrape, which could replace the ad-driven model and be viable for more creators.

After AI scrape the ad free content, they'll probably turn around and show end users the AI summary with Ads. It never ends. The problem is a much deeper flaw at the heart of capitalism. Enshitification of everything.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#205

Post by RyanHamilton »

1gn15 wrote: post #98

Given CloudFlare's direction, I won't be surprised if they start offering "anti adblock as a service" soon. Detecting it is still rather simple, and add in some punishments such as temporary IP blocking, and it would be rather effective. (Note that everything CloudFlare talked about in this blog post also applies to adblock users, not just AI agents.) The golden age of the Internet is not where people do it for money…

I've probably spent 400+ hours a year sharing content because I wanted to. However the wanted to, was partially because of the good feeling i got from knowing I was helping semi-specific people and then later meeting those people. It's sparked numerous interesting friendships and discussions. That latter part will no longer happen as the AI sits in the middle and becomes the known source. It has massively put me off creating more content. I wasn't creating content to generically help humanity move forward, I did it to help people similar to me facing particular situations. As that becomes diluted, the incentives won't hold to the same degree.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#206

Post by swed420 »

AuthAuth wrote: post #193
swed420 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some positive news today, Cloudflare is sponsoring the Ladybird browser effort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332860 That's not nothing.

Its a token gesture. Ladybird is not a serious disruption.

How could you be so confident about such a thing?

Are you implying it's going to fail in its goal as a competing browser, or that the competition is somehow irrelevant in a world that's forced to be slave to Google/Apple?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#208

Post by vogu66 »

acdha wrote: post #112
vogu66 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare. Cloudflare is already a monopoly though. From what I can tell, what they are saying here, besides proclaiming their continued existence, is that they and AI companies and content creators need the internet to exist. And what they are building is on top of the 402 response, which anyone can use? So you could use that without using any CD…

How is Cloudflare a monopoly as opposed to just being popular? The CDN, security, edge compute, etc. markets all have multiple popular competitors.

Sorry, not exactly monopoly. Probably too big to fail, from what I gather, though. I don't know enough to know whether there is anyone else that could realistically compete with their scale.

My point was simply that their size is unrelated to this proposition, outside the fact they are big enough to be taken seriously.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#209

Post by computerdork »

computerdork wrote: post #169
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #66

"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…

Had a similar thought, yeah, Spotify is like this. I don't know what the numbers are, but a very, very large majority of musicians make very little money off of Spotify (Weird Al Yankovic said he made enough in a year to buy dinner for himself). 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 Youtub…

Btw, to all that are reading this, actually, found out the that Weird Al's music makes a lot more from Spotify than buying himself a sandwich - His rights holders get paid by spotify. These middlemen then take a cut and pay Weird Al. But on top of this, since Weird Al does parodies, the musicians he parodies also take a share (Michael Jackson, Nirvana...).

He got 80 million streams of his music in 2023, which paid out $386k to his rights holders according to a Spotify payout calculator. Not great, but not bad. https://musically.com/2023/12/01/weird-al-yankovics-spotify-...

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#210

Post by Karrot_Kream »

cj wrote: post #50
neuracnu wrote: post #30

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…

Valid point / not a bad idea. One flaw might be that (successful and high quality) content creators are accustomed outsized rewards for their work. Ads pay very, very well for people creating content viewed by a lot of people. Would AI companies be willing to match that (even 50% match)? If not, we might just end up with low paid copyrighters / ghost writers churning out large amounts of content for LLMs in subject a…

I think Patreon-style backing has been proving out the viability of payment based creators. Technology Connections is largely funded by Patreon but puts out free content all the time. My guess is that once x402 becomes more standardized that Youtube, Substack, and other SaaS can add in paywall functionality which can help fund the free content for creators.
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