Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Ads can't monetize an agent's visit
How ads fund free content
Google loses money on most queries and makes it back on a few, and Twitter works the same way with most of its users. Ads suit that setup because they are very good at differential pricing, which is why they became the dominant business model on the web. The model rests on limited human attention turning into outcomes.
Agents break the loop
If agents show up instead of humans, the loop stops working. Say a publisher gets a thousand human visitors and converts 20 of them into monthly subscriptions. With agents, there are no statistics: the publisher can't tell whether the visits will lead to subscriptions or whether nameless agents will keep taking the content.
Some publishers already pay for SEO to attract more humans and cut off the agents that come with them, even though each agent acts on behalf of a human. A visit that can't be monetized is a cost, so the content gets closed off.
How do ads price each user differently?
Online ads are sold through auctions in which advertisers bid for each impression based on what a particular user is worth to them. A person searching for a product ready to buy attracts higher bids than a person browsing idly. Platforms therefore earn more from a few valuable users than from the many who bring in little. This is how a free service can charge its heaviest commercial users the most.
How do publishers keep AI crawlers out?
Publishers list the crawlers they refuse in a robots.txt file at the root of their site. OpenAI published the name of its GPTBot crawler in August 2023, along with instructions for blocking it. The robots.txt convention dates to 1994 and was formalized as an internet standard, RFC 9309, in 2022. It works only when the crawler chooses to follow it.
Why do paywalled sites still want search traffic?
Search results bring readers who can later become subscribers. Many news sites show a limited number of free articles so that visitors can sample the writing before deciding to pay. The share of visitors who convert is the number publishers watch most closely. Visits that never lead to a subscription or an ad impression add server costs without adding revenue.
More from Training Data
