THE ‘DEAD INTERNET THEORY' IS REAL. AND IT'S KILLING THE WEB AS WE KNOW IT

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

The 30-year-old online advertising model was never really selling attention, it was selling access to a human being who could be flattered or worn down into a purchase. Agents don't have that vulnerability, so surveilling one produces nothing to sell, and more than half of all web traffic is now agents rather than people. What a business can still offer an agent is qualification on merits like price, reliability, and data quality, not persuasion, which is a fundamentally different kind of customer relationship to build for. The model isn't being reformed by regulation or backlash, it's dying because the traffic itself changed completely.