There’s a million reasons to publish, but they all come down to two things.
One – getting heard, making noise.
Two – making money.
And the internet is a great place for both of those things. As we’re moving away from classic backend-frontend websites towards a future where content is generated by LLMs, we need to make sure both of those things are protected.
Your voice
It started with the book press and continued with the internet. The fact that people can write something once and have it distributed to many is incredible. That I can write something potentially accessible to over 5.5 billion people is amazing, and, well, it needs to be protected. Websites are uncensored. They run on servers you can own, and nobody can tell you to take something down.
In an AI-first web, where end users no longer access individual servers directly and servers are instead used as information storage for AI responses (at least until we figure out a decentralized solution), people interested in my opinion no longer read my words – they see only the AI’s interpretation. And for that AI interpretation, there’s a thin line between manipulating and fact-checking that we need to figure out.
Making money
Ads won’t work in the future. And unless you offer exclusive, high-demand content, paywalls won’t either, same with selling data. None of these work if people never actually visit your domain. And if a site has a paywall, well, the browser will just move to the next website with the same information.
What we need is a Spotify-based licensing system where every site is paid per usage, very little, but with billions of people using AI that needs information, there might actually be a world where this works. Notice how Google AdSense currently doesn’t pay much per view and not much per click.
A small monthly fee, say EUR 2, for AI to use content from a particular source? Sure, that could work. Mostly, though, it would apply to exclusive content sites like Bloomberg with Apple leaks.
I’m positive on that one. It’ll further democratize publishing. A “this guy says this and that guy says that” model, where everyone publishes thoughts on their own server, just wasn’t possible before. And now it is.
Online stores?
One last thing – if the title made you wonder about online stores, that’s an interesting topic too. Sure, LLMs will be able to make purchases via shop MCP actions, but the real challenge is AI comparing prices across all providers in real time. There are and have been price comparison sites out there before – in Austria, we have idealo.at and geizhals.at – but most people don’t check. Or they don’t even know these exist. Or they already have an account at a provider company and don’t want to bother with creating a new one.
If everyone automatically gets the lowest price, it will create the biggest race to the bottom in prices so far. On-site upselling will be just as hard, same with user retention – unless we get AI to a state where you “open” a shop in the AI and then the shop site takes over the AI responses, but that would just be a worse user experience. So I don’t see that one as an option.
We’ll figure it out.