After the Billboards: Designing the Next Discovery Model

What replaces the open web's billboard economy when the funnels fade?

Google's quiet courtroom admission set the stage: the open web is in rapid decline. The headlines touched the quote, but the deeper question lingers—what happens after the billboard highway collapses?

This isn't just about SEO disruption or advertising margins. It's about the habits of discovery that shaped two decades of digital life—and what fills the void when those habits break.

The billboard economy, explained

For years, the open web worked like a highway lined with billboards—search engines and feeds funneled people past pages where impressions and clicks were monetized into astonishing sums.

Affiliate links, influencer campaigns, and display ads all depended on that predictable funnel. Now, AI assistants and summarizers increasingly bypass the click. No click means no impression, no affiliate fire, no revenue.

The impact goes beyond ads

  • Affiliate marketers face the evaporation of a sizable revenue base — global affiliate marketing is projected to reach $37.3 billion in 2025, up from $32.3 billion in 2024. Source
  • Influencer income stands to erode significantly — the influencer marketing industry is projected to hit around $32.55 billion in 2025. Source
  • Marketers and publishers lose more than margin — they lose the mechanism of discovery.
  • Consumers lose a system that trained them to find the next best thing. Without funnels, discovery itself is at risk.

The internet painted itself into a corner

Print declined, the web rose, and affiliates plus influencers became the discovery engine. People learned a habit: want something new? Search. Scroll. Click. Now both print and open-web funnels are shrinking. The habit loop may vanish.

What comes after the billboards?

  • Direct trust channels: newsletters, podcasts, communities where people opt in.
  • AI-ready publishing: content structured for retrieval and summarization, not just keywords.
  • Curation as a service: fewer sources, higher signal; context layered onto headlines.
  • Micro-monetization: tipping, bundles, or metered access that don't rely on mass traffic.
  • Influencers 2.0: rising as trusted guides—yet constrained by bias and scale.

AI as cause—and cure

Here's the irony: the collapse was triggered in part by AI, but AI can also provide the solution. Retrieval agents, contextual feeds, and adaptive curation can rebuild discovery for a post-billboard world.

But bias lurks. What happens when you prompt for “the best” and the answer is really “the paid for”? If AI becomes the billboard, we're right back where we started—with less transparency.

This is the fork in the road: build systems that make discovery transparent, fair, and plural—or repeat the same cycles of monopoly, cloaked in AI wrappers.

Further Reading