TLDR Tech / Marketing
The ‘dead internet theory' is real. And it's killing the web as we know it
The 30-year-old online advertising model was never really selling attention, it was selling access to a human being who could be flattered or worn down into a purchase. Agents don't have that vulnerability, so surveilling one produces nothing to sell, and more than half of all web traffic is now agents rather than people. What a business can still offer an agent is qualification on merits like price, reliability, and data quality, not persuasion, which is a fundamentally different kind of customer relationship to build for. The model isn't being reformed by regulation or backlash, it's dying because the traffic itself changed completely.
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