Ever since the launch of social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, a new vocation has been born.
Whether you call it being a influencer or a content creator, it all boils down to the same thing: you are a person that uses your popularity on the internet as a way to earn money.
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It’s a highly lucrative practice for millions of people and has plenty of appeal. Companies send you freebies or want to pay to partner with you, and you get to make content about whatever you like.
Or the flip side, however, are dark stories about influencers who fell slave to pleasing the algorithm, with many developing mental health issues and anxiety due to keeping up with a demanding schedule of pumping out content.
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Whether you believe content creation as a vocation is good, bad, or somewhere in between, the fact is that it’s a way to make a living that did not exist 20 years ago.
But the advent of AI is already making changes to that economy — and one CEO believes the shift could kill content creation as we know it.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has a troubling outlook on how AI will impact the future of content creation.
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AI summaries are changing the internet’s business model
The topic of how AI is affecting what content creators make arose during a video interview on May 21 between CNBC and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Price.
“I think the economy is for sure changing,” Price said. “And what’s changing is not that fewer people are searching the internet. It’s that more and more answers to Google are being answered by the AI box at the top of Google.”
Price goes on to explain that people are using AI to search more often than ever. That’s slowing down the way search engines have previously been used, which in turn affects the way content creators currently operate.
“If you look at OpenAI, six months ago it was 250 scrapes to one visitor,” Price said. “If you look today, its 1,500 scrapes to one visitor. And what that means is that if you’re making money through subscriptions or advertising, any of the things content creators do today, visitors won’t be seeing those ads or buying those subscriptions anymore. And that means it’s going to be much, much harder for you to be a content creator.”
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However, the good news is that content creators aren’t limited to just creating content and waiting for a Large Language Model (LLM) to scrape it. Price says there is a solution.
“You can use services like Cloudflare — and this is what we’re working with the largest content creators to do — to say ‘You can’t access my content if you’re an AI crawler unless you pay me for that content.’ And that’s exactly what the future has to be,” Price says. “The fuel that runs these AI engines is original content, so that content has to be created in order for these AI engines to work.”
“What content creators have to do is restrict access to content, create that scarcity, and say you aren’t going to get my content without paying me for creating that content…original content is going to be more valuable,” Price says.