Cloudflare proposes the Spotify model for the web (www.coryd.dev)

Cloudflare’s 2025 founder’s letter argues the web is shifting from traditional search to “answer engines” — chat-driven interfaces that keep users on the platform while scraping sites for citations and data — and proposes a Spotify-style revenue model to pay creators. In this model, AI companies would contribute funds (e.g., dollars per monthly active user) into a pooled pot that’s redistributed to content creators based on how much their material fills gaps in the models’ outputs. Cloudflare frames its role as building the plumbing for that market — SDKs, gateways and infrastructure that would facilitate pooling and payments, effectively positioning platforms as the gatekeepers who hold the keys. For AI/ML practitioners and the broader web ecosystem, the proposal matters because it reframes discovery, monetization and incentives. Technically, chat-based answer engines change traffic flows (reducing referrals), rely on scraping and pruning algorithms to decide what content is valuable, and could push creators toward producing model-directed content. That centralizes control: algorithmic valuation determines payouts, and middleware providers could enforce protocols and extract fees. The implications touch model training, citation fidelity, SEO, creator economics, and governance — raising questions about transparency of pruning/valuation algorithms, fairness of distribution metrics, and how to design open standards before platformized payments and incentives reshape the web.