No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.

What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it.

The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.

I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.

How can we adapt that to LLMs? Do LLM providers pay for access to these articles?

Do I as a user have to do a micro transaction whenever an LLM generates an answer on one of those paywalled articles? Because as a user, I do not wish to read the quality journalist analysis, I wish for it to be part of the LLM answer that is tailored towards me.

I think the micro transactions thing would be ideal, and should be something between the LLM providers and the websites, the users should pay solely for the subscription of LLMs being able to search.

But this is a huge simplification of course, and another thousand problems arise from this model. So I have no idea what’s the “good enough” solution we’ll head towards, or whether the web will change completely from this.