The Internet Has a Signal Problem. AI Is Making It Unusable.

The creator economy is valued at $250 billion today. Goldman Sachs estimates it will double to $480 billion by 2027. Most of that money doesn't reach the people who actually create the value — and that's not an accident. It's a structural problem built into the internet's business model. AI is now forcing it into plain sight.

I've worked closely with content creators for more than a decade. The pattern is consistent: the people who actually create the value walk away with a fraction of what they generate. Not because what they produce is poor quality. Because the system was never built for them. On average, around 5% of platform revenue flows back to the creators who built the foundation those platforms stand on. The rest goes to selling your attention to advertisers.

How the model was born

Understanding why this happened is worth the effort. When the internet arrived in the 1990s, payment infrastructure and trust simply didn't exist online. Nobody paid by card on the internet. Nobody sent money to strangers behind a screen. So the early platforms solved the problem the only way they could: free content attracted users, users attracted advertisers, and advertisers paid for access to that attention. It was a reasonable solution to a real problem — and it worked well enough to build something enormous.

The solution became a system. The system became infrastructure. Today, Google, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok rank content on a single signal: clicks, scroll time, and minutes on screen. A teacher who makes students genuinely better and an influencer opening packages on camera are treated as equivalent — because the algorithm doesn't measure value delivered. It measures exposure captured.

AI is breaking the signal entirely

Artificial intelligence is in the process of making that signal unusable. In 2025, over 74% of all new web content contained detectably AI-generated material. By 2026, experts estimate 90% of all online content will be machine-produced. A ranking system built on attention doesn't function in a market where volume is infinite and the source is indistinguishable.

This brings us back to something old and simple.

Commerce has functioned for thousands of years on one principle: you pay for the value you actually receive. That's how the caravans along the Silk Road worked. That's how the markets of Mesopotamia worked. Willingness to pay is a signal that is almost impossible to manipulate. Subscribing to a personal trainer's content because she makes you genuinely better is fundamentally different information from a click. The first is a signal of real value. The second is noise.

Scale makes this better for everyone

The scalability of digital services turns this into a better deal for all parties. A personal trainer with real expertise is no longer limited to the clients they can physically reach. They can reach a global audience and be paid directly for it. Scale drives the price down for the subscriber and revenue up for the creator — without a platform taking most of the difference.

The question isn't whether this happens

The shift is already underway. 2025 data shows brands increasingly paying creators based on actual sales rather than exposure alone. Direct subscription platforms are growing. Affiliate revenue for creators doubled between 2021 and 2024. The market is slowly but clearly returning to its foundations.

The question isn't whether this shift is coming. It's already here. The question is whether creators and investors are positioning themselves for it now — or watching from the sidelines while others do.

The internet has a signal problem. AI is making it worse. The solution isn't better regulation of the old model. It's building a new one — where money follows value, not volume.

Originally published in Norwegian in Finansavisen on May 20, 2026.