Even a Blind Squirrel Finds a Nut

With or Without Facebook Search

(Disclaimer: this post is rife with feigned self deprecation and poorly veiled self congratulatory misrepresentations.)

Was Google Really F****d? (No.)

Almost 14 years ago I said Google was f****d(*) because of, amongst other things, Facebook search (note: asterisk to explain my hyperbole; TLDR: Google would be just fine). And I doubled (or tripled) down on that >10 years ago when I declared that Facebook Graph Search would be better than Google search (TLDR: because of the social lens). I was wrong. And I conceded as much at the start of this year in a retrospective I wrote grading my past performance. Specifically:

“…my contention was that money would flow more profoundly to social networking because companies like Facebook and Twitter would do search better than Google given the “social lens” that would make results dynamic and more relevant…. Verdict: dead wrong. Facebook et al never really bothered with search (and it doesn’t seem like they ever will)....”

Somehow, someday.

But at the start of Les Prophéties du Porch(dog) (aforementioned retrospective), I also noted that the greatest fortune tellers are extremely vague so that they are always right somehow. And I could have added “and someday.” And as luck (another thing great fortune tellers have) would have it, Facebook, er, Meta seems to be getting into the search game after all. You may have already noticed the search button / bar on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp et al has changed to “Ask Meta AI or Search.” And now The Information (in a paywalled post, grr) shares that Meta is indeed working on “a search engine that crawls the web to provide conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta AI chatbot.” (Take that, paywall.)

Yet Another Search Revenue Model?

Ah the evolution of revenue models for content and search (again). Yes I believe there is an emerging revenue model for AI / LLM search / chatbots / whatever you want to call this and my guess is it’s more “Spotify-like” where these search / conversational platforms have subscription tiers (including free) that go up with the quality of content used (scraped / borrowed / paid for?) to train models and create (dare I say generate?) new content. This would be in addition to charging more for better models, which ChatGPT already does. And sure there could be revenue from (sponsored?) annotations like Perplexity has (though not yet to generate revenue); though even Perplexity is working on paying for content used to train its model. I wrote more about that here and here.

The big nut to crack, however, remains how we track or otherwise make sense of what and whose content is used to create new content via GenAI so everybody gets paid. I conjectured that it would involve blockchain, though that sounds a bit far fetched at the moment. (Still, see above re “somehow, someday.”) The closest I’ve seen so far are companies like Tollbit, a two-sided marketplace for AI companies and publishers (which I gleaned, er, copied / pasted from their website) and Evertune, which does brand monitoring and analytics for the AI era (copy / paste again FTW). Tollbit just raised $24M from Lightspeed et al after early funding from BDMI (hi, Sim!) And Evertune just raised $4M from Nextview (hi, David!) and ENIAC (hi, Nihal / Hadley!) Certainly those are two to watch. (Disclosure: I am a tiny LP in ENIAC Ventures.)

Amirite?

So I guess I was right again (on Facebook search); I was just too early. And to quote Ed Hajim, my first hedge fund portfolio manager and partner: “Too early is wrong.” (PS buy his books here and here.) But will I be right on these emerging business models? I guess we’ll have to give it more time for that to happen and for the rest of my predictions to come true (I’m talking to you, blockchain:))