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.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
1:18 When AI Bot Traffic Overtakes Humans
4:19 What Cloudflare Actually Does
10:40 Life on the Internet’s “Ice Wall”
13:33 The Internet’s Business Model Problem
17:43 Google, Traffic, and the Attention Economy
24:56 AI Agents and the End of Ads
28:47 Why Faster Answers Can Still Hurt Creators
33:26 AI Companies as the Next YouTube or Netflix
38:18 Creating Scarcity for Content Markets
41:52 Content Independence Day
45:24 Should AI Agents Count as Human Users?
51:37 The Risks of Subscription-Only AI
57:24 A Golden Age of Content Creation?
1:01:46 Pay-Per-Crawl and x402
1:04:34 Why Stablecoins Matter
1:07:56 The Cloudflare Stablecoin Question
1:14:18 The Final Form of the Internet
1:17:40 The Park Record and Local Journalism
1:22:16 The Centralization Risk
1:27:12 Advice for Content Creators

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RESOURCES

Matthew Prince
https://x.com/eastdakota

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures