Increasingly, people are getting their information directly from chatbots, which do the trawling for us, instead of using conventional search engines to find relevant sites and then visiting those sites. According to The Economist (July 19, 2025), the consequent loss of revenue from advertising that appears on those sites poses a looming problem. The internet is in trouble because AI-powered search engines are reducing human traffic on the Web. After all, humans are needed in the loop—to make purchases, to spend money, to be good consumers!
From the point of view of those who have felt all along that the Web should be a non-profit resource, commerce is not the victim but the perpetrator. From that point of view, the Web has been in trouble from its inception.
Certainly, there are costs involved to maintain the internet as a “commons.” (Accelerating electricity consumption for giant servers could one day bankrupt the planet—but that’s another story.) These infrastructure costs must somehow be passed on to users. The latter pay fees for access to their internet provider, for example, and for various apps and services. Yet, the bulk of the cost of running the Web is apparently paid by advertisers—and, thus, indirectly by consumers who view the advertising. They pay by buying products advertised—despite (and indeed because of) having paid for internet access. The business model is like a conventional newspaper, which charges a subscription fee but also derives revenue from printed advertising. The proportion between these sources of revenue can vary.
Presumably, advertising works, otherwise it wouldn’t pay. What that actually means is that it causes people to buy products and services they would not spontaneously seek out, and perhaps do not actually need. The word literally means “turn (attention) to.” In other words: to advertise is to distract attention from where it would otherwise be directed. This is a complaint of many users, who find the distraction of online ads annoying. Some are willing to pay for the “service” of not being exposed to them. In effect, they would rather pay up front for internet access than pay indirectly through ads. This changes the balance between direct and indirect revenues; but the fees for ad-blocking do no go (directly) to pay the costs of infrastructure.
Why advertising works is a mystery with deep implications for society and human psychology. For people who know their own needs and wants, it is helpful to get information about products and services they seek, and how to find them. Information about what they do not need and are not seeking is noise—an annoyance. Personal assistant chatbots can provide a very useful service by searching, upon request, for those products and services a client actually wants. In other words: shopping for the client. However, advertising is not based on this client-driven model, but on manipulating people to consume.
If consumers were rational, advertising would not pay. Users tolerate online ads because they seem to get free access to the sites that incorporate them. But if advertising works, the access is not free. We do pay for it—indirectly and collectively, if not personally. If you don’t happen to respond in that moment to the ads on that site, someone else nevertheless does. The effectiveness of advertising is statistical.
Big data is a new commodity, ultimately dependent on advertising. Aside from identity theft, your personal “data” are about your online attention patterns, so that advertising can target you specifically. If advertising never works on you, your data are worthless commercially, although they could be of interest to the state. You get the advertising anyway, because statistically it works on enough people. It would cost the advertiser to remove you individually as a target— which, ironically, has become a service you can pay for, with ad blockers or with the effort it takes to “unsubscribe” to a mailing list.
For those who seek fingertip information online—for whatever purpose—chatbots provide a valuable service, for which we should be willing to pay. For those who seek to make money from their websites indirectly through advertising on their sites, chatbots may represent a threat to their traffic-based income. This points to a divide in motivations. In the early days of the internet, there was great hope for a universal non-commercial show and tell, where people could share information freely—that is, without restriction and without cost beyond maintaining infrastructure. It did not take long for commercial interests to take over—for the purpose of profit unrelated to that cost. The Web is now primarily a marketplace that incidentally allows show and tell.
Those motivated to share content altruistically, or for fun, need not feel threatened by chatbots stealing traffic from their sites. If the information is the important thing, then what does it matter where it comes from or how it gets delivered? If the information is offered gratis, crediting sources is important for validation—but not because of copyright. The problem is rather for those whose livelihood depends on the sharing—authors, artists, musicians—who need and deserve compensation for their creative efforts. Their livelihood depends on it. AI threatens to take over their production as well as to affect their distribution. On the other hand, the threat to those whose “productive” contribution is no more than manipulating the attention of others—or profiting indirectly from their labors—is a different matter. The divide is roughly along the lines of the traditional divide between labor and capital.
Will chatbots diminish the incentive to create online content? Well, that depends on what that incentive is. If you are making content primarily for gain, then you may deservedly be at risk. If your motive is to share your work for its own merit, or for its potential benefit to others, you should not necessarily be discouraged by a decrease in human visits to your site. Your work will be forwarded, in some digested form, by chatbots that may actually frequent your site more often than was occurring before.
The more disturbing question is how chatbots will transform that content. Volunteers may be discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia, for example, if they know the information will be distorted or that Wikipedia will not be credited. This is an epistemic issue of citing sources, not a commercial one. It reflects broader issues of the dissemination of information in modern society. In contrast to the non-profit Wikipedia, Reddit is a show-and-tell forum that is also a corporation with a listed share price. Those who share on the platform may or may not be shareholders in the corporation. Even for those who are both, losing human readers should be a different concern than falling profit. AI now competes with human content providers, who have been competing with each other all along. Getting attention remains the same needle-in-a-haystack problem it has always been. If AI can provide better content faster, this is indeed a challenge to humans, but one we have created ourselves. Let us rise to it!
Many academic publishers of journals and book now encourage an “open access” model, where authors or their institutions pay the cost of publication, which is then available online to the reader for free. This has been very profitable for the publisher and very costly to the supporting institutions, such as universities. It may be one cause of rising tuition fees. Why should costs for reproducing content online should be so high, when the intellectual content itself has already been produced for free, or already paid for through academic employment? The cost of formatting has been greatly reduced by AI tools, and pre-publication editorial reviewers are usually unpaid volunteers. A simple answer is greed, euphemistically known as profit margin. Academic publishing is big business, dominated by a few players. In the context of the present information distribution system, the publisher offers what seems to be a valuable service, given the absence of alternatives—though hardly out of the goodness of their heart. AI has the potential to revolutionize the information distribution system, so that access would be truly open. But predatory commercial interests will try to hijack it for their own benefit.
Motivation is the dilemma that underlies the emerging crisis for the Web—and for the world at large. The issue was there from the start, when the internet was envisioned as a “commons” whose use was up for grabs. It was there at the origins of capitalism, when lending transformed from a reciprocated neighborly gesture to ruthless usury. Should the Web be for sharing information, moderately compensated, or for rampant commercial exploitation? As it stands, sharing of information is still possible—in the context of commercialism. According to The Economist, “everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay.” Really, everyone? The tragedy of the Web is the tragedy of modern society. We are in a crisis of motivation.