Ben Thompson's 'Agentic Web' thesis: advertising is the original sin, stablecoins are the fix

Summary

Ben Thompson argues that advertising was the correct business model for the 1990s internet, not a failure. Marc Andreessen explained in a 2019 podcast that browsers never embedded payment functionality because it was technically impossible at the time. Visa and Mastercard controlled the payment rails, and neither the credit card companies nor web entrepreneurs negotiated a deal. Advertising solved a real problem instead. Users got free access to vastly more content. Advertisers found customers they couldn't reach before. Content creators reached larger audiences. The economics worked.

Over 30 years, credit card companies improved their digital infrastructure, partly thanks to companies like Stripe. The advertising-fueled web generated enormous economic value. Micropayments never worked anyway. Credit card fees are too high, content production costs are front-loaded while payoff is unpredictable and backloaded, and constant payment decisions create decision paralysis. Subscriptions work at small scale like Substack because they fund a human or institution, not individual articles.

The open web is now dying for structural reasons. Users increasingly live in walled gardens like social platforms. SEO spam and generative AI have made search frustrating. People ask ChatGPT or Google for direct answers instead of clicking through links. Search results are polluted by AI-generated content. Google was keeping the open web on life support, and if it loses antitrust cases and loses motivation to drive traffic to ad-supported publishers, the open web accelerates its decline. The long tail of advertisers will lose their distribution channel. Ad-supported content sites are barely hanging on.

Microsoft's Build 2025 announcement described the agentic web. Kevin Scott outlined two key components. MCP (Model Context Protocol, created by Anthropic) acts as HTTP for AI agents, allowing them to interact with services reliably and interoperably. NL Web (Natural Language Web) is a markup layer that lets websites and APIs expose themselves to agents without building custom integrations, described as HTML for the agentic web.

The critical gap exists in the business model. On today's web, when you expose your content via schema, RSS feeds, or search engines, you get traffic back that you can monetize. As AI-based search answers content directly without sending clicks, that traffic dried up. In the agentic era, if you build a schema for agents to query your website, there is no clear incentive. Scott vaguely referenced advertising and transactions. But advertising breaks down because agents don't see ads and aren't persuaded by them. Transaction-based sites like TripAdvisor, O'Reilly, and Bring a Trailer can survive because the agent becomes a distribution channel for actual sales. Content and lead-generation sites face decimation.

Thompson proposes stablecoins and agentic micropayments as the solution. Stablecoin legislation recently cleared a procedural blockade in the US Senate, with bipartisan support and a vote expected soon. Stablecoins solve the micropayment problem Thompson outlined earlier. They have dramatically lower or zero fees, are infinitely divisible down to tiny amounts, and are programmable.

Agents are uniquely suited to micropayments because they aren't subject to human decision paralysis. They can execute thousands of small transactions instantly. The entire digital ad ecosystem already works this way. Every page load triggers a machine auction in milliseconds, with agents bidding fractions of a penny to serve ads. Agents can do the same for content, paying tiny amounts each time they access an article, a recipe, a database lookup, or a service call.

The problem is that this ecosystem only works if content creators actually earn revenue from agent traffic. If agents replace human readers, ad-supported content dries up, which dries up the supply of quality content for AI training. OpenAI and Google are hacking around this by cutting direct deals with Reddit, news publishers, and other creators, which is bad for the sort of competition Microsoft wants to engender and won't scale.

Stablecoins and native agent payments could rebuild the content marketplace entirely, but only if the infrastructure is baked in from the start. Unlike the 1990s, when native payments were technically infeasible, the technology now exists. The question is whether the industry will build it.