Written by Brook Schaaf

It is a dark time for the open web. Although landmark monopoly and social media trials have exposed the Empire’s bid for total control of advertising dollars, its agents still blockade any traffic that might escape the Imperial walled gardens, unless advertisers pay the toll. Leaderless commerce content creators, influencers, and shopping portals across the far reaches of the internet are hunted so that their life force can be extracted and their likeness cloned. Probes examine every device, signal, and surface so that the obsessive Empire can fully know and control identity, intent, and even discovery across all space lanes.

In last week’s episode, A New Hope, we reviewed the clear and present danger to affiliate marketing: zero clicks means zero commissions. Yet this danger also represents a rare opportunity, as sponsorship and advertising dollars may be reallocated during this liminal time. Thus, the dominance of the Empire (the advertising triumvirate of Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon) is threatened. As Digiday put it, “The ad industry is entering a period of profound transition as artificial intelligence reshapes how media is created, distributed, and monetized — the problem is, it’s not really clear how that’s going to play out.” As in the movie trilogy, it will fight to keep everything it has and take more, never mind the collateral damage (the livelihoods of countless website operators and the open web itself). 

Based on extensive research for my forthcoming book, I have become convinced that the walled gardens are oversold, i.e., that they are able to win more advertising dollars than they should for a variety of reasons, primarily because they “grade their own homework.” If this premise is correct, then tens of billions of dollars are at stake (hundreds if ChatGPT can take its bite), especially as potentially neutral AI-mediated attribution emerges. Companies like Newton Research might mash up MMM and MTA attribution and reveal that dollars should be reallocated. (A longer topic for another day, and no guarantee, but it seems like a good chance.) 

So what counters might the Empire deploy?

• Increase Complexity, Reduce Transparency, Limit Data Portability: AdSteller, an AI image generation tool, notes that “Facebook ad targeting used to feel like having a superpower” because of “surgical precision” targeting, but that “superpower is gone.” Many others have said the same about Google, which no longer provides the exact keyword-level clarity it used to, pushing advertisers toward Performance Max. Along with Amazon, all three are often black boxes, which advertisers are afraid to stop feeding cash into, even if the results are dubious. Of course, these are framed as improvements.

• Block Agents: In one sense, agents might be considered super scrapers because they necessarily retrieve site data to act upon it, which threatens not only content sites with extraction but also the Empire’s own properties (never mind its own behavior). Perplexity’s Comet browser won a stay on Amazon’s injunction against it. One imagines Google’s lawsuit against SerpAPI, filed in December, could boomerang back against it.

• Disintermediate Creators: Instagram recently caught flak for its “Shop the Look” feature, which cribbed content “without the creator’s permission and without any form of compensation.” Google filed a patent for “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” and has already been observed to use “AI to replace headlines,” as the Verge found. In addition to all this, a new feature called “Skip digging, start guided research” has been observed.

• Capture the Creators: In more favorable news, a day after YouTube announced “A New Era of Brand and Creator Partnerships,” Meta, vying for the same creators, also announced “a New Era: we’re helping creators highlight products directly in their posts and Reels, and earn money through new affiliate partners.” This is global, as evidenced by coverage of the Bangladeshi market. Assuming we get more of this and less of the Instagram theft, this augers well for affiliate, though it occurred to me that a latent threat has emerged for the tracking platforms, which the Empire might someday seek to supplant. 

The value of creators on channel platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is undeniable at this point, though attribution has yet to catch up. And attribution feels very far away for any kind of open web bloggers or commerce content creators, though their content is widely used for inference. 

The Empire Strikes Back ended with the Rebels in a state of disarray after a crushing defeat at Cloud City (what a perfect name in this context), though the end was not without hope: Han Solo was still alive, albeit frozen in carbonite, and Luke Skywalker was rescued by Princess Leia. So we should have optimism for the future. Like Luke, we, too, have the power to refuse the dark side. 

The post The Empire Strikes Back appeared first on FMTC.