AI has changed a lot of stuff in the tech world. It's driven us from StackOverflow (okay, we were already leaving), it's killing junior developers (or killing seniors), and most recently, it's draining funding from the open source work that we're all depending on. I want to talk about that last bit today.
You might have read the suggestion here to increase everyone's github subscription price by $1, and pay that towards open source software. I think that's a great idea, but I don't think it's enough. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, a lot of information started being available on the web, in exchange for our eyeballs or attention. This includes classical news websites like CNN and New York times, newer websites like Vox, and even your favorite recipe website with the four page introductions about the life changing events on Christmas Eve, 1997. Even Wikipedia, which couldn't exist if no one ever saw their little 'support us' banner.
I wouldn't want to be the guy starting a website that shared information in exchange for human eyeballs right now. I just don't trust that there'll be enough human eyeballs available. Especially not if that information is at all related to software. I think the thing that is happening to Tailwind CSS will rapidly start happening to a lot of our online sources of information. So, we need a solution, and I have a suggestion.
Right now, a lot of the internet is running on ads, which pay a tiny bit every time a human looks at your website. What if we did that, but just paying directly, without any advertisers involved. We set up a system where every time you access a website, you pay a tiny amount. This would be independent of whether you are a person looking at this website or an AI agent looking at it. How much would we have to pay to match current web advertising?
I went through the history on my computer & phone and counted how many distinct websites I accessed every day. Today I accessed 19 distinct websites (it's a Sunday), yesterday 32, and I did this count every day, and ended up on 309 distinct websites times days over the week. If we generalize that out to the month, with an average of 4.345 weeks per month, I access about 1343 distinct websites \(\times\) days. This probably doesn't match exactly the number of advertising 'impressions' I give, since 1) A lot of those websites are services I pay for in one way or another, and 2) some of those websites with advertising I access several times. But I would be surprised if I gave out much more than 5000 impressions worth of ad revenue a month.
According to my random online sources, 1000 impressions go for anything from $0.5 to $5. That means I could directly pay just $10 a month, and I would be able to pay a good CPM (cost per thousand visitors) of >$2 to all those websites. If I wanted my AI agent to access those websites, it would have to pay, too, avoiding AI leeching their business.
Every site could of course choose if they would want to do this, but this system could ensure that we keep rewarding those that provide us with useful information on the internet. It could encourage open-source software, since they could use distribution platforms that receive small payouts for their use. It could ensure that the internet keeps existing, pretty much
So yeah, that's the idea I want to share. I call it 'The Lightly Paid Internet'. I don't know how we implement it, but I kind of like it.