Category: The Web As Platform

Where’s The Business Model in Chat-Based Search?

 

Google’s AI Overviews feature in its main search service.

Two years ago I wrote a series of posts exploring the business model and interface implications of generative AI-based search. At the time, it was not clear how Google would respond to the existential threat that ChatGPT and its peers seemed to present. If it took root, a chat-like interface to search would fundamentally disrupt Google’s core revenue model. What was the company going to do about that?

I noted that six months into the GPT revolution, Google’s response seemed to be overly cautious. I encouraged the famously slow-moving company to go on offense: “It’s time to push something out to market, it’s time to declare yourself the leader in this new market, and it’s time to lay out a vision for what the future of computing will look like,” I wrote. “Imagine if they had waited until they figured out how to make money before launching Google Search?”

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How Is AI Changing Search? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New data highlighted in Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter codifies what most of us have already assumed: AI chatbot usage is starting to reshape search. And when search changes, so does the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately, the data lacks a fundamental denominator, and as such, only serves to feed the signal-free hype cycle we’re currently in.

The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:

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Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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Can Bluesky Do Advertising Right? Yes.

Chart compiled based on various web sources for both early Twitter and recent Bluesky growth.

I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advertising industry to make it happen – an industry often reviled as the driver of “surveillance capitalism,” the attention-mining, data-driven monster supposedly at the center of the Internet’s enshittification. 

So I wasn’t shocked when Bluesky CEO Jay Graber acknowledged last week that advertising might be in the company’s future. The company is growing at a blistering pace, adding tens of millions of users in a matter of months. It costs dearly to service that kind of growth, and the company has investors to appease. Bluesky’s growth mirrors Twitter in 2008 – 9009 – the year that Twitter first raised capital at a billion-dollar-plus valuation. Twitter proceeded to introduce advertising as its core business model one year later, in 2010.

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The Tragedy of Generative AI 

Yes, I have no patience for perfecting image prompts using AI.

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all of us wanting, but most importantly, leaving you out of power. And given that you value power over all else, it strikes me it might be in your own self interest to consider an alternate path. 

Here’s the problem: you’ve managed to convince nearly all of us that sometime real soon, generative AI will deliver us powerful services that will automate nearly every difficult and/or deadly boring task we currently have to perform. From booking complex yet perfectly priced itineraries to delivering personalized health diagnoses that vastly outperform even the most cogent physician, your AI agents have us starstruck, bedazzled, and breath-baited.* 

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The Token Act – A Modest Proposal from 2018

I’m in the middle of a rather large project, attempting to consolidate a thread running through roughly a dozen essays I’ve written over the past decade or so. I keep running into borked links when I hit one particular piece – which can be found on LinkedIn, but not this site. It’s a seminal reference post about a fictional “Token Act,” which I proposed while researching Internet policy at Columbia back in 2018. I’m going to repost it here, below, so it’ll live on my own domain from now on. 

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Social conversations about difficult and complex topics have arcs – they tend to start scattered, with many threads and potential paths, then resolve over time toward consensus. This consensus differs based on groups within society – Fox News aficionados will cluster one way, NPR devotees another. Regardless of the group, such consensus then becomes presumption – and once a group of people presume, they fail to explore potentially difficult or presumably impossible alternative solutions.

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Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

The 26 words that “changed the internet.” Image NYT.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market. 

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Consume First, Deal with the Shit Later

https://dailymontanan.com/2021/06/12/big-bad-forest-clear-cutting-continues/

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media

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Ads, Ads Everywhere

The Times’s piece decries all the ads on TV. But is this a surprise?!

The advertising world is uncomplicated at its core, and utterly bewildering when seen from the outside. The easy bit stems from a simple axiom: Wherever you can find the attention of potential customers, you pay to get your message in front of them. That’s the essence of advertising: paying for attention. It gets complicated by the details – the medium, the message, the targeting, the tech – but wherever customers gather, advertising will follow. There’s simply too much money to be made for it to be otherwise.

So it was utterly unsurprising to learn, a few hours ago as I write this, that there will soon be ads on PayPal, driven by the data the company collects. PayPal recorded 6.5 billion payments in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to the Journal. The company plans on creating what’s known as a “retail media network” allowing advertisers to leverage PayPal’s data to target users both on platform and off.

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