“Token Creators” and Online Communities

Ben Thompson, in this week’s article at Stratechery, wrote about how publishing has been transformed via the creation of the printing press, the internet, and now AI.  Each of these inventions has changed the creation-to-consumption pipeline, removing bottlenecks, increasing the availability and amount of content, and enabling new publishing platforms.  This was a long article, but well worth the read.

Ben talked about the importance that the creation of online communities will be for independent publishers. Publishers won’t be able to directly rely on ad revenue if users are turning to LLMs for their information, so they will need to support themselves in new ways, including subscriptions or paywalled content. Assuming that in the long run, companies won’t be able to use copyrighted materials for AI training, publishers will also have the opportunity to license their work for training, whether that be direct licensing or some variation of Cloudflare’s pay per crawl service. Regardless, the economics are likely to change,

I do think that there is a market to be made in producing content for AI; it seems likely to me, however, that this market will not save existing publishers. Rather, just as Google created an entirely new class of content sites, Amazon and Meta an entirely new class of e-commerce merchants, and Apple and Meta an entirely new class of app builders, AI will create an entirely new class of token creators who explicitly produce content for LLMs. Existing publishers will participate in this market, but won’t be central to it.

I sincerely hope “Token Creator” never shows up as an option for career day.