For as long as I have been online, one phrase has stuck with me: when you can't tell how a company is making money, you are the product. Usually that means your data, your time, or your attention. Those are the things a business quietly sells while you enjoy something that feels free.
We are now entering a world where it is becoming trivially easy to build almost anything. So the question I keep coming back to is simple: how do companies stay afloat and make money when the thing they built can be copied in a day?
I will be honest, I dislike the truth I keep landing on. There is no version of the future where Google, Amazon, Meta, and the rest simply step back and let the internet become a free market with no dominant players. Companies that large do not surrender market ownership, control, and financial influence without a fight. So if a competitor can replicate your product in an afternoon, what keeps you alive?
I have narrowed my thinking down to two hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1: Data and community become the moat
You can rebuild YouTube as an app almost instantly. That does not give you YouTube. You still lack the content, the userbase, the community, and the brand power that took years to accumulate. The software was never the hard part; the network around it was.
As building gets cheaper, the durable advantage moves almost entirely to the things you cannot copy overnight: proprietary data, an engaged community, and the trust attached to a brand. The clone compiles in a day. The audience does not.
Hypothesis 2: Agent search gets monetized
This is the one I have believed for a while, and it is the one I am now watching come true.
Think about how a typical website makes money today. An article earns through ads: more traffic and more dwell time means more revenue. That model quietly assumes a human is sitting there reading the page. But an AI agent can search hundreds of sources in seconds through retrieval (RAG) and never load a single ad. The traffic that used to pay the bills simply evaporates.
For a long time I wondered how publishers could possibly charge for that. This week I read Cloudflare's announcement of its Monetization Gateway, and I think it is the first real signal of what comes next.
The gateway lets a site charge for access to its pages, datasets, APIs, and even tools, settling tiny payments (think a few cents per search) directly inside the normal flow of an HTTP request. It builds on x402, the open protocol that had been the missing technical piece: the thing that lets an agent see a price, pay it, and get the content, all in one round trip.
The shape of it will change, but I would wager this is the general direction. Two things still have to fall into place:
- Agents have to start paying. They need to adopt these gateways and treat information as something you buy, not just scrape.
- Websites have to start serving through them. Publishers need to put their content behind the meter instead of the ad.
Once both sides show up, a market exists. And markets, once they exist, tend to grow.
Two feelings about all of this
I hold two reactions at the same time, and they do not fully reconcile.
The opportunity. This could be genuinely great for the people who move early. I see it the way I saw YouTube in its early days: anyone could make content, and if it took off, you could build a real future on it. A web where agents pay for good information rewards the people who produce good information. Get in early, and you could be one of them.
The risk. It could also quietly kill the "free" internet we grew up with. If everything you do online costs a small slice of money, or if we split into a free, low-grade web and a paywalled high-quality one, that changes everything, and not necessarily for the better. The open web has always been messy, but it has also been open. I am not sure a metered version keeps that spirit.
The clone compiles in a day. The audience, the trust, and the open web do not.
What we can do about it
Either way, this is coming. The best thing we can do is understand it early enough to help shape it, rather than wake up inside it and react. Educating people on what is happening is how we stay ahead of it together.
So I will leave you with the question I am sitting with: what can we do to push this shift in a positive direction? If you have a view, I would genuinely like to hear it.
This is exactly the kind of thing we chew on in our community. Join our Discord and tell me where you think this goes.
Images via Pexels under the Pexels License. Photos by Pachon in Motion, Dave Garcia, and Kris Møklebust.