Era of Agents: Your Assistant Will Ask for Allowance

Hey guys! In the era of agents, the economic model of the internet will change. Today the internet is powered mostly by subscriptions and by ads. With agents exploring the internet and completing tasks automatically on behalf of someone, this will become way more dynamic — and there is just no option, it will have to change.

You cannot serve ads anymore in exchange for access to content, because the agents will either easily ignore the ads, or you will have to actually contaminate the content with them — and then the quality of the content goes down.

A way easier solution is micropayments: ad-hoc micropayments to access certain content. If an agent comes to your website or your service and would like to access some information that otherwise would be available for free in exchange for showing an ad, you say: okay, you’re an agent, no problem — you can access the details, it will cost you 10 cents. Even half a cent. With the scale, with all these agents deployed out there, this allows crazy scale economies. Even selling it for half a cent will actually be an economically viable model.

And that’s really interesting, because it is already doable today: Bitcoin, Ethereum, all the smart contracts and micropayments make it possible, since the cost of the transactions is almost zero. And now, with the agents, this will become a necessity. New protocols such as x402 actually try to make it a reality.

So in the future your agent will have to have an allowance — a daily allowance, a weekly allowance, maybe a monthly budget as well. And you’ll have to be able to trust it to spend your money wisely.

That’s all.