About this episode
The internet is about to be flooded by machines, and Matthew Prince thinks the old business model is not ready. The Cloudflare co-founder and CEO joins Bankless to explain why AI agent traffic could overtake human traffic by 2027, how crawlers are changing the economics of content, why ads and subscriptions may not survive in their current form, and how x402, stablecoins, and pay-per-crawl could create a new payment layer for the web.---📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium---BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKEThttps://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast🟦 COINBASE ONE | MEMBER MONTHhttps://bankless.cc/coinbase-one🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDEhttps://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOWhttps://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELDhttps://bankless.cc/brix🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTShttps://thedefireport.io/bankless---TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro1:18 When AI Bot Traffic Overtakes Humans4:19 What Cloudflare Actually Does10:40 Life on the Internet’s “Ice Wall”13:33 The Internet’s Business Model Problem17:43 Google, Traffic, and the Attention Economy24:56 AI Agents and the End of Ads28:47 Why Faster Answers Can Still Hurt Creators33:26 AI Companies as the Next YouTube or Netflix38:18 Creating Scarcity for Content Markets41:52 Content Independence Day45:24 Should AI Agents Count as Human Users?51:37 The Risks of Subscription-Only AI57:24 A Golden Age of Content Creation?1:01:46 Pay-Per-Crawl and x4021:04:34 Why Stablecoins Matter1:07:56 The Cloudflare Stablecoin Question1:14:18 The Final Form of the Internet1:17:40 The Park Record and Local Journalism1:22:16 The Centralization Risk1:27:12 Advice for Content Creators---RESOURCESMatthew Princehttps://x.com/eastdakota---Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures