Ben Thompson's 'The End of the Internet': when creation goes free, winners go small
tushaarmehtaa · x · 2026-10-26
A retweet highlighting Ben Thompson's Stratechery essay "The End of the Internet," with an infographic mapping three cycles over 23 years where technology made creation free — blogs (2003), social (2006), and now software (2026).
Each cycle follows the same loop: new tech democratizes creation → flood of content → discovery/distribution winners take all → the open web breaks → the escape is going smaller:
- Blogs: WordPress made publishing universal, the blogosphere doubled every 40 days; Google captured the value via AdSense; the answer was subscriptions (Andrew Sullivan earned nearly $1M/year from 5M paid subs).
- Social: posting cost nothing (1% post, 9% comment, 90% lurk); algorithmic feeds turned social into entertainment; the answer was group chats (38-person WhatsApp groups, Instagram DMs exceeding feed use).
- Software: AI coding agents let anyone ship — 234,800 new App Store apps in Q1 2026, up 84% YoY; OpenAI's crawler now reads more than Google refers, and disclosed bugs doubled; the answer is apps for one team — software ends as group chat, not a market.
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