Inside the collapse of the internet economy (and what comes next)

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Azeem Azhar sat down with Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare. Matthew is a rare operator with the vantage point to answer a simple question: if agents do the reading, who gets paid?

This conversation is a practical map of how AI “answer engines” upend the web’s traffic-funded model – and what could replace it.

Chapters:

• (00:46) The currency of the web is dying
• (06:08) Google's inflection point
• (10:08) Why a broken business model might save the internet
• (14:44) The incentivization of ragebait
• (20:38) Content scarcity as a solution
• (24:35) What could a new content business model look like?
• (28:51) The challenge of pricing information
• (29:31) How Cloudflare thinks about the creator economy
• (32:06) Should smaller companies pay less?
• (34:24) Can markets solve this without Congress?
• (39:11) How does the agentic web affect content?
• (43:40) A rare chance to redesign the internet

Produced by EPIIPLUS1 Ltd and supermix.io

Production and research: Chantal Smith, Hannah Petrovic, Nathan Warren and Marija Gavrilov.

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