In January 1996, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote and published an essay titled “Content is king.” Little did I know that it would become one of the most prescient essays on technology ever published, and that 30 years later we would still be talking about it in relation to the modern Internet.
The essay that I just reread and that you can read yourself. online in PDF formatstarts with the line, “It’s in content where I expect a lot of the real money to be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”
I vaguely remember what the Internet was like in 1996. I was only eight years old, but the adults around me (especially at school) were already getting a taste of what it had to offer. It was extremely slow, based almost exclusively on text and without any real centralizing effort.
Content is where I expect much of the real money to be made on the Internet, just as it was with broadcasting.
Bill Gates, “Content is king” (1996)
The fact that Gates’ words remain so prescient today in an Internet that looks nothing like it did in 1996 is downright remarkable.
Gates was right when he predicted that content would be the key to making money online, with everything from blogs (like Windows Central, which has been around for 20 years), news sites, video and streaming channels, podcasts, newsletters, and much more.
Multibillion-dollar industries were built around the idea that good content would find audiences through search engines, which would then generate revenue through readers visiting those sites.
Save me from irony
The implicit contract to deliver clicks to content held strong for many years and formed the basis of the Internet’s content-driven economy. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will last much longer.
The irony is not lost on me. Bill Gates He is one of the leading engineers in the technological world we know today, for better or worse. The world Gates helped create also gave rise to AIwhich has become so powerful in part thanks to the content that humans have created and posted online over the past 30 years.
when I say that AI it’s hurting content creators, I’m not saying that in the abstract. According to some estimatesorganic traffic to websites in the US decreased by more than five hundred million visits between 2024 and 2025.
When Google’s AI Overview feature hit the top of search pages in May 2024, it only took 12 months for the click-through rate on real websites to drop from 44% to 31%. That cut hasn’t stopped bleeding.
Considering how much the internet’s top content creators rely on traffic and associated ad revenue, it’s no wonder so many websites struggle to pay creators.
What options are left for content editors?
While Google was busy taking over driving the vast majority of web traffic, it was also laying a trap. A particularly nasty trap.
Publishers need to publish and, ideally, need to be seen by Google to have the best chance of having “hit” content. Opting out of allowing Google’s AI crawlers to see your content means opting out of Google entirely, which is a worse fate. It’s a “pick your poison” situation.
So far, content licensing deals haven’t worked either. Click-through rates are still in free fall and publishers are still trying to figure out how to get out of Google’s trap.
Ultimately, this begs the question: “What will Google steal if it puts all publishers and content creators out of business?“
The dark turn of the AI content era
The phrase immediately after Gates’ first line in his 1996 essay is almost as poignant and also ripe for debate.
The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including television manufacturing, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to provide information and entertainment.
Bill Gates, “Content is king” (1996)
It’s no secret that broadcasters and studios became incredibly rich thanks to the television revolution, and we’re seeing the same kind of thing repeating itself.
The long-term winners are the artificial intelligence companies that deliver the information that content creators produce and publishers input to the web. This time, however, the long-term winners are winning by stealing content they didn’t create, that was created by writers who are already or will soon be out of work.
Thirty years ago, Gates envisioned an all-encompassing Internet, where ordinary people could publish content and contribute to a living information economy. He, at least, was partly right.
The Internet’s information economy is absolutely thriving, but the actual humans who provide the content may soon be no longer part of the cycle.
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