Zero Clicks #31: AI is Stuck in a Malthusian Trap

Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media and commerce. Here’s your TL;DR for what awaits this week: 

• The big picture: Pay-per crawl and pushing back against Silicon Valley’s dangerous game

• Job posts: It’s a newsletter thinkboi summer

• One great read: The definitive guide to how answer engines are changing content creation  

• AI tool of the week (new section!): The first voice-to-text tool that actually makes you faster and more productive

But first a word from our sponsor, Sleek.

“Owning your audience is more valuable than ever in a world where Google search is less reliable and LLMs are emerging as product discovery platforms.”

In a recent Martech Record interview, publisher Michael McNerney sat down with Daniel Baum, co-founder and COO of Sleek, a company reinventing browser toolbars with the power of AI. What followed was a sharp look at how AI, personalization, and changing user behavior are reshaping affiliate marketing and the very structure of digital commerce.

Asked how far along the agentic industry is, Baum likened it to being in the "second or third inning" of a baseball game. LLMs can now classify ecommerce pages and extract meaningful data like SKUs and order numbers, but full agentic commerce—where bots conduct entire purchases autonomously—is still developing.

Sleek’s long-term vision centers on dynamic deals, where discounting and acquisition strategies adjust based on the individual user’s behavior and lifetime value (LTV). In this future, offers won’t be static. Instead, publishers and merchants will dynamically negotiate terms in real-time based on user profiles, enabling better alignment between cost of acquisition and consumer value.

Stream the full conversation here.

AI’s Malthusian Trap

As billionaires go, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is something of a punk-rock mensch. Channeling his best Bill Pullman, Prince declared July 1 “Content Independence Day” in a blog post that is the most significant piece of linguistics since the tweet that introduced ChatGPT to the world.

Prince’s concept is simple and ambitious: dusting off the old vintage web 1.0 HTTP Response Code 402, Cloudflare is introducing a pay-per-crawl beta, giving publishers the option to allow, block or charge AI crawlers for access to content. Predictably, most of the takes have centered around whether this could “save” news from AI. The better question: could it save AI companies from their own worst instincts?

Framing this as a civic virtue and fairness discussion misses the point. It is in Google and OpenAI’s most cynical and ruthless capitalist interest to reset their relationship with content creators and preserve access to their most precious resource.

As it stands, each share of search that shifts to answer engines leaves fewer incentives for creators to produce original, indexable work—a potentially existential threat to LLMs. A classic Malthusian trap.

First described in Thomas Malthus’s “An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798, Malthusian Theory states that while population growth is theoretically exponential, the growth of the food supply is linear, thus creating an inevitable check on the size of a populace.

The concept has been applied to tech before, notably by Derek Thompson in a now somewhat infamous Atlantic Essay that argued that big tech stocks were vulnerable because human attention is a finite resource and Silicon Valley was reaching the limit of what could be harvested.

Thompson’s piece was well-written, brilliantly-argued and ultimately, laughably, wrong. Instead of hitting our screentime limit, we instead got COVID, TikTok, MrBeast and a perfect storm of attention hijackers. Compared to the digital fentanyl that we mainline today, the information economy of early 2019 looks fundamentally quaint.

As we barrel into the AI era, our old friend Malthus feels more relevant than ever. LLMS grow more powerful by the day and in some cases, are truly growing exponentially. But their underlying design and business model that strips agency from creators is choking their food supply. This is actually a more extreme version of the Malthusian concept– it’s not just that high quality content can’t scale at the rate AI needs it to; tech companies’ own policy choices accelerate the trap.

However flawed the mass scale and SEO arbitrage era of content creation was, it (generally) at least incentivized creators to make open, indexable work available to the masses on the open web. Both for our own vanity as writers and from a pure business sense, we wanted our work to be seen by as many people as possible. Working in media was a Faustian bargain targeted at ego – you’d be overworked and underpaid, but once in a while, millions of strangers might learn your name.

This was a great deal for Google: The unbridled hope of young keyboard warriors fed the beast.

With today’s AI overviews and answer engines, that bargain is gone. The best creators are inclined to make their work as closed off as possible, a sort of content walled garden to shield against commoditization.

In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and others have suggested a future where a whole class of professionals–presumably those who no longer have any reason to write on the open web– effectively create training data for LLMs. In this world, both individuals and institutional media companies effectively become content wholesalers to AI companies.

This is potentially a viable business model but...what's the point? Call me a hopeless romantic but the whole reason to create content is so human eyeballs see your work. Telling your mom you blew a quarter million dollars on journalism school to be the invisible fourth citation on her Perplexity answer doesn’t hit quite as hard as the framed column with your face on it.

Arguably the best product decision that OpenAI and other answer engines made is to place a premium on freshly written content over the types of evergreen, SEO-optimized pieces that dominated the last two decades of the web. When OpenAI or Perplexity provides that magical moment of seamlessly answering your question, it generally isn’t citing a Healthline article from 2015 to do so. This underlying product design only heightens the need for fresh, unique perspectives to reference.

Silicon Valley is currently playing a dangerous game in betting that there will always be enough people who irrationally love the creator hustle to maintain a scalable proletariat of content creators, no matter how fucked the incentive structure gets. Maybe they’re right to be smug– as I type this, it’s 12:32 AM on a Sunday during the 4th of July weekend and I’m writing a piece that’s free to be crawled.

But eventually, if putting original thinking out into the world becomes a raw enough deal, there will just be less crawlable original thinking in the world. There will be nothing but slop in the trough.

And without the food supply, generative AI can’t generate anything.

Global Practice Leader, Performance Marketing, Criteo
Over the last five years, Criteo has executed perhaps the most stunning turnarounds and evolution in all of media. Once a legacy retargeting solution that looked like a vestige of a former era of the internet, the platform is now firmly established as an essential lynchpin at the heart of commerce media.

As the company looks to bolster its performance marketing expertise, this would be an interesting moment for a brand or agency growth guru to make the jump to the technology side.

Senior Editor, Salesforce Newsroom, Salesforce
With apologies to my friend Noah Greenberg who is the king of the corporate newsroom beat, I must say that there is definitely a renewed zeal among corporates trying to build full fledged editorial operations ...and paying up to do it. Here, Salesforce is offering $200K+ for an editor with only a few years experience. Nice.

Senior Director, Newsletters, CNN
Lest you think the newsletter craze has hit its peak, I’m here to tell you it’s a hot thinkboi summer. And it looks like CNN wants in on the party.
Jarrod Dicker’s take that the modern media company is effectively a record label is one that continues to age gracefully, reinforced again in a very interesting episode of The Rebooting where Vox President Ryan Pauley laid out their podcast strategy.  CNN has always had a penchant for promoting individual brands so stands to reason they’ll do more in the newsletter game.

Here’s a fun prediction for you – in late 2026, Warner Bros. will buy Substack.

How SEO will change in a world of AI Search, Grow and Convert
Fielding questions from executives about what’s happening with AI Overviews? Here’s the article to send them.

Wispr Flow
To make this newsletter a bit more utilitarian, we’re trying something new. For the next few weeks, I’ll be signing off by highlighting an AI tool I’m playing around with. This is NOT sponsored – just a way to hopefully help you discover new technology.

The Arthur Clarke quip that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is a painfully overused cliche. But Wispr Flow is something of a magical product.

I’ve tried a few dictation apps over the years and most of them work fine. But only Wispr Flow has a unique knack for turning a frenetic stream of consciousness into legible, coherent thought. In doing so, it’s the first voice-to-text that I actually feel making me faster.

While I’m not quite at a point where I speak this newsletter instead of writing it, I could see myself getting there. In fact, I’ll give it a whirl next week.