In January 1996, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote and published an essay titled “Content is King.” Little did he know that it would become one of the most prophetic essays on tech to ever be published, and that 30 years later we’d still be talking about it in relation to the modern internet.
The essay, which I just re-read and which you can read yourself online in PDF form, opens with the line, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”
I vaguely recall what the internet looked like in 1996. I was only eight years old, but the adults around me — especially at school — were already sampling what it had to offer. It was extremely slow, based almost entirely on text, and without any real centralizing efforts.
Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.
Bill Gates, “Content is King” (1996)
The fact that Gates’ words remain as prescient today with an internet that looks nothing like it did in 1996 is frankly remarkable.
Gates was correct in predicting 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.
Multi-billion dollar industries were built around the idea that good content would find audiences via search engines, which would then generate revenue via readers visiting those sites.
Save me from the irony
The implied contract delivering clicks for content held strong for many years and formed the foundation of the internet’s content-driven economy. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be around for much longer.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Bill Gates is one of the primary engineers of the tech world we know today, for better or for worse. The world that Gates helped create also gave birth to AI, which has only become as powerful as it has in part thanks to the content humans created and published online for the past 30 years.
When I say that AI is damaging content creators, I don’t mean in some abstract fashion. According to some estimates, organic traffic to websites in the US dropped by more than half a billion visits between 2024 and 2025.
When Google’s AI Overview feature arrived at the top of search pages in May 2024, it only took 12 months for the click-through rate to actual websites to drop from 44% to 31%. That cut hasn’t stopped hemorrhaging.
Considering how much the internet’s primary content creators rely on traffic and associated advertising revenue, it’s no wonder that so many websites are struggling to pay creators.
What options do content publishers have left?
While Google was busy taking over the direction of the vast majority of web traffic, it was also laying a trap. A particularly nasty trap at that.
Publishers need to publish, and ideally, they need to be seen by Google for the best chances at having a “hit” piece of content. Opting out of allowing content to be seen by Google’s AI crawlers means opting out of Google entirely, which is a worse fate. It’s a “pick your poison” type of situation.
So far, content licensing deals haven’t really worked, either. Click-through rates are still in freefall, and publishers are still trying to figure out how to remove themselves from Google’s trap.
This ultimately begs the question: “What will Google steal if it puts all publishers and content creators out of business?“
The dark twist of the AI content era
The sentence directly after Gates’ opening line from his ’96 essay is nearly as poignant, and it’s ripe for discussion as well.
The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries,
including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.Bill Gates, “Content is King” (1996)
It’s no secret that broadcasters and studios became unfathomably rich by way of the TV revolution, and we’re seeing the same sort of thing repeated.
The long-term winners are the AI firms that deliver the information that content creators produce and that publishers get onto the web. This time around, however, those long-term winners are winning by stealing content they didn’t create, which was created by writers who are already or will soon be out of a job.
Thirty years ago, Gates envisioned an all-encompassing internet where regular people could publish content and contribute to a living economy of information. He, at least, got part of it right.
The internet’s information economy is absolutely thriving, but the actual humans who provide the content may soon no longer be part of the cycle.
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