The whole thing needs a reframe. Ad driven business only works because its a race to the bottom. Now we are approaching the bottom, and its not gonna be as competitive. Throwback to the 90s when you paid for a search engine?
If you can charge the user (the customer- NOT the product) and then pay bespoke data providers (of which publishers fall under) then the model makes more sense, and LLM providers are normal middlemen, not parasites.
The shift is already underway imo - my age cohort (28 y/o) does not consume traditional publications directly. Its all through summarization like podcast interviews, youtube essays, social media (reddit) etc
:-)
Separate monthly fees for separate services is absolutely unsustainable already. The economic model to make the internet work has not yet been discovered, but $20 a month for a search engine is not it.
The way reddit limited access to their API and got google to pay for access. Some variation of that but on a wider scale.
Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement".
If anything, that arrangement of publishers and providers became an actual parasite on society at large these days. Publishers, in particular, will keep whining about being cut off; I have zero sympathy - people reach for LLMs precisely because publishers have been publishing trash and poison, entirely intentionally, optimizing for the parasitic business model, and it got so bad that the major use of LLMs is wading through that sea of bullshit, so that we don't have to.
The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.
(Unfortunately, LLMs will work only for a short while, they're very much vulnerable to capture by advertisers - which means also by those publishers who now theatrically whine.)
Just a wild guess, but at best that content is probably pretty mediocre quality. It's probably Mikkelsen Twins ebook-level garbage.
(In fact, there's value in trying to filter excess crap out of existing training sets.)
What happens when you need to search something new? Just hallucinations all the way down?
- Publishers no longer show you ads, they just get paid out of BAT.
- Brave shows you ads, but Brave does not depend on that to survive. Because of that there is no weird conflict of interest like with Google/Facebook, where the party that surfaces your content is also the party providing you with ads.
- Users can just browse the web without ads as a threat vector, but as long as you have BAT (either via opt-in Brave ads or by purchasing it directly) you are not a freeloader either.
You opt-in to the ads, you get them in your notifications, and every time you tap on one of them you get a few BAT. You browse, the BAT get paid out to whichever sites you visit (or linger on, depending on your configuration). You can opt out of the ads at any time. Brave didn't pre-mine their own coins. And you can buy BAT if you want to support sites without watching ads.
Showing people ads is part of the problem to be solved.
And the website gets paid either way.
Not every person/site can run on Patreon or sponsorship deals. And paywalling a lot of the web would exclude vast swathes of people.
2. "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
3. The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
You do. The ad broker sells access to your eyeballs to a company, and then gives part of that money to whichever parties have a monetization agreement in the content.
> "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
Always fun to see people with strong opinions be critically misinformed.
Brave’s ads don’t have tracking, by design.
> The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
By that logic we should stop paying for art?
The others can shut up.
Research is usually not paid by ads.
Some of the best scientists did it for fun. Einstein wrote his 1905 papers while working at the swiss patent office.
For services like rail companies, restaurants and so on, I can see them not being bothered, because they make their money offline. Blogs, and pure content sites might not be to happy about their content being used to prop up OpenAIs business, while getting nothing in return. If anything it seems like OpenAI is actively trying to get sued.
The whole interface and functionality seems really nice and a clear improvement for the users, for certain types of queries at least. It assumes that OpenAI has made their LLM stop lying, and that they can get the required data legally, but it doesn't seem like anyone cares about those details.
Which is the main issue I see with them, if no one publishes anything new, all you will get is whatever was there before, which may be incorrect or obsolete. If you want something new, an LLM can't discover it if no data source exists. So over time the LLM becomes useless for current information.
Out of the pot and into the fire, as they say.
Bullshit. Users have shown time and time and time again that they prefer (generally, at large) free content, which has to be supported by ads, over actually paying directly for the labor of others.
> The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.
I tend to agree, but people can't expect content, which needs sizable amounts of time and money to produce, for free - it needs some sort of workable funding model. LLMs are only viable now because they were able to slurp up all that ad-supported content before they broke the funding model. That window is closing, and fast.
But yes: the original Web served its (non-profit-motivated) creators and readers. The past two decades of advertising-based web has served publishers and advertisers, precisely as you note. LLM is mixing that up for the moment but I sincerely doubt that it will last.
That said, I welcome the coming ad/pub pain with unbridled glee.
Not to mention that users consuming most content through a middle-man completely breaks most publishers business models. Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.
Expect to see a lot more technical countermeasures and/or lawsuits against LLM search engines that regurgitate so much material that they effectively replace the need to visit the original publisher.