Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, cofounder and CEO of The Browser Company, a comparatively fresh software maker that develops the Arc browser. David Pierce, my Vergecast cohost and Verge editor-at-large, is simply a large fan of Arc and has written about it rather a bit for us. You can read his review here.
Basically, Arc is simply a ground-up rethinking of the web browser. Most modern browsers started as simple paper viewers and grew to support moving complex apps. Arc’s main conceit is that it’s designed to make moving and utilizing all those apps as simple as possible. You’ll hear Josh describe it as an operating strategy respective times, which is simply a beautiful large claim to make, and he and I got into what that actually means for a web browser.
There are any AI tools built into the Arc browser, but the company besides has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages. That puts it in competition with OpenAI’s forthcoming SearchGPT and Google’s Gemini-powered AI Overviews in its search results. At the same time, it besides puts Arc right in the mediate of 1 of the fiercest debates in tech and media today: whether AI companies and products are boosting content from the open web and then turning around and selling it to consumers — all without paying the people who produced that work anything at all.
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We’ve been talking about these topics beautiful much nonstop for the last year here on Decoder. So I was truly excited to have Josh on the show to research why he built Arc, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve.
I wanted to know how Josh is reasoning about competing with Chrome on the desktop and Apple’s Safari on mobile, and especially how he plans to monetize Arc. Chrome and Safari are quite a few things, but mostly, they’re developed by any of the richest companies in the planet and given distant for free. Josh says the plan is to keep Arc free but monetize a mix of customization, automation, and productivity tools that will make users’ lives so much easier that they, or the company they work for, pay a subscription fee.
It’s a bold thought to bring competition back to the browser market, and early reception to Arc has been positive. But you’ll hear Josh and I go over any of the major challenges they’ve faced so far, like having to teach people all-new sets of metaphors and plan language around what browsers should be doing and why you would even want to usage a web browser to run apps the way Arc is suggesting. (Or why you’d want to usage a fresh browser at all.)
I besides asked Josh about his take on the controversies swirling around generative AI and whether the web as an information distribution strategy is going to last a major plundering of all its pages. Josh is beautiful candid about what he does and doesn’t know about how this might play out, and he’s besides more open to changing his head than arguably any tech CEO I’ve talked to about this subject. It’s a good back-and-forth, and I’m curious for your feedback on it.
One fast note before we start: after we recorded this conversation, The Browser Company disclosed a beautiful severe safety vulnerability in Arc that could have let attackers insert code into another users’ browser sessions. It was patched a day after a investigator made the company aware of it in late August, and the company says no users were affected. But it’s a crucial issue, and in a message released last week, the company said it marks “the first serious safety incidental in Arc’s lifetime.”
We tried to get Josh back on the show to talk about it, but he was unavailable the day the flaw was disclosed to the public. The company does say it’s making quite a few large safety improvements. And in a separate message on X, cofounder Hursh Agrawal said, “A heartfelt thanks for all the concern (and even outrage) you’ve all expressed about this incident, and for holding us to a advanced standard.” He went on to say that he and the company will “be utilizing this chance to grow as a company, as an engineering organization, and personally as a founder.”
Okay, The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.
Josh Miller, you’re the cofounder and the CEO of The Browser Company. Welcome to Decoder.
I’m excited. We’re in the studio together in fresh York. It’s a uncommon occurrence on Decoder. Thank you so much for being in individual with me.
Oh, it’s so fun. I was hoping you’d go easier on me, but I was told that it is absolutely not true.
Oh, no. erstwhile you’re in person, it’s even harsher due to the fact that I can grin at you while—
Well, it’s large to be here. I think I’ve most likely listened to almost all Vergecast and Decoder interview episode for the past fewer years.
The studio is as good as you said it was.
It is. We have a fancy fresh upgraded studio. I’m happy you’re here. There’s a lot to talk about. The Browser Company runs a browser called Arc. You run a mobile app called Arc Search, which is browser-adjacent, I would say. It lets you browse the web in a fresh and different way.
You’re evidently competing with Google. Google appears to be in a minute of change — regulatory change, self-imposed change — and then there’s AI. And obviously, Arc Search is built in as an AI product. But let’s start at the very beginning. What is The Browser Company? What is Arc?
The Browser Company is making a web browser called Arc, which the simplest way to explain it is The Verge called it “The Chrome replacement that they’ve been waiting for.” So, don’t take it from me.
David Pierce called it that. I just want to be clear.
[Laughs] David Pierce said that. No, Arc is the best browser for laptop people. If you’re individual whose livelihood is clicking and clacking on your keyboard all day, we make the best browser for you [that] keeps you focused, organized, and increasingly, we want to do your busy work for you.
Let me ask you a question about that. So, if you are individual who makes money on a laptop, you’re presumably utilizing quite a few applications, not looking at quite a few content. I would love to be a individual who made quite a few money on my laptop just by looking at quite a few another people’s content, but I fishy what you’re getting at is this is simply a productivity application.
So, the origin of The Browser Company is I was a political appointee in the Obama White home and after the 2016 election, I was personally devastated by the result. I felt like technology and the technology manufacture had an impact on the things I didn’t like, and I was very motivated to effort to do something about it.
My takeaway was, if you are not an operating system, if you’re not a platform by which your applications and content sits on top of, you don’t truly have leverage to change for the better or worse the way that society uses technology. So, we decided not to start a company and do something else. And then it was in 2019 — my wife works in the art planet for artist James Turrell in Flagstaff, Arizona — that I noticed that she never left Chrome. She was on this high-powered MacBook Air and never left the confines of Chrome.
So, the first reflection of The Browser Company was actually our operating systems, in 2019 then and definitely in 2024 today, are actually our web browsers for laptop people. You’re sitting in applications in a browser. Your files are now URLs, too. So, the founding inside of the company was, “Wait a minute: browsers were designed for the information highway. They were designed erstwhile the web was a publishing platform. That has changed. Browsers have not. Why is that?” Spoiler alert: money. “Can we make your quality of life on the net better?”
So, you are correct in that comparative to the origins of the web and the origins of browsers, people are not spending as much time with content as they are with beginning their browser and doing their work.
So, it’s an application environment. That’s what I’m getting at, and 1 of the things we talk about in Decoder all the time is how the application model moved from Windows to the web to mobile, and then possibly back to the web. There’s something happening there that seems big, and it’s kind of landed on the web. Most people who want to deploy a desktop application turn to the web first. I don’t think quite a few people are deploying Win32 first anymore. Do you see your browser as having a meaningful impact on that class of developers?
Because if you’re an operating system, you have quite a few power, right? You’re like, “Here’s any APIs. Here’s any capabilities of my operating strategy that a developer can use.” This is what all the major operating strategy vendors say to their developers all the time. You’re saying my browser is an operating strategy and people are deploying applications to the web. Are you in conversation with those applications? Do you offer those developers fresh capabilities, or is it truly just about the end user?
It’s a large question, and I actually think this is where Google deserves quite a few credit. I think if there’s 1 thing Chrome and the Chromium squad specifically has done a fantastic occupation of is building an operating system, or an application platform, that developers love, mostly speaking, and they make it more and more powerful. In fact, you had Dylan Field on this podcast; Figma would not be if it weren’t for Google, Chrome, and Chromium making the web fantastic for application platforms.
What we’re focused on is the individual and the individual at the another end. So, what we think about is the focus on developers, and the focus on publishers as Google describes them, has left the individual on a Tuesday at 2PM lacking quite a few powerful tools to make them better and faster. So, of course, we have integrations with different third-party application developers. I would love it if we could offer stuff that makes them love Arc more.
But in fact, we think that what was missing was looking at my wife utilizing her laptop on Tuesday at 2PM [and realizing], “Wait, that’s what she’s doing? We can do better. Computers can do more than that.” So, that’s the orientation we take to our work.
One of the large questions erstwhile you’re starting a fresh browser company is, one, how will you take share from Google and Microsoft in Safari, peculiarly in iOS? And then two, what engine are you using?
Because you’re not going to compose a fresh browser engine that seems like a massive undertaking. You’ve landed on Chromium. It seems like the full manufacture is headed towards Chromium. Microsoft famously uses Chromium now. Was that a large decision? Was that a small decision?
To be honest, it was an intentional decision, but it was a small decision. And for better and worse, the subject of my answers in this podcast will most likely be, “We come back to the individual at 2PM on a Tuesday.”
If there’s 1 thing they want from their rendering engine, if they’re acquainted with what a rendering engine is, it’s that their web apps work. So, for example, for whatever reason, we have quite a few teachers and people in education utilizing Arc. quite a few software at school districts are optimized and actually only work in Chrome-based browsers. It was intentional in that we wanted to make certain we could strip out quite a few the kind of tracking and nefarious parts of Chromium that at least don’t align with our values.
But erstwhile we realized we could do that, we thought, “Hey, almost all website will work on this rendering engine. We want to make your day better at 2PM. Let’s jump to that part,” to the end person-facing part of the software.
So, you’ve got Chromium as a rendering engine that’s the same as Chrome. Arc itself is the Chrome around Chromium. This is just the language. So, you built a wrapper around Chrome — that’s a beautiful acquainted idea. And then the thought is all of those things will make productivity, peculiarly productivity for cognition workers, better on the web. But you’ve invented quite a few terminology.
There’s a sidebar, there are spaces — there’s just metaphor after metaphor in Arc that are different from Chrome, right? There’s boosts. There’s just quite a few words and concepts in this browser, which are interesting, but quite a few them are, “We gotta teach people a fresh metaphor for utilizing the web or reasoning about this browser as an application layer in their computer as opposed to just a web browser.” Where did the genesis of this come from, and how did you go about, honestly, just picking all these names?
Yes. To be totally honest, I regret many of those words. I want we didn’t have so many fresh concepts. And I think it’s besides complicated of a part of software for many people, and I think we gotta make it a lot more simple. But where it came from was, “Wait a minute: if you look at someone’s tab bar and they have 50 tabs open, and they’re truly teeny tiny, and there are quite a few duplicates — why? You don’t request 5 versions of the same Google Doc. How can we solve that problem?”
So, most of the fresh concepts came from the position of “what is broken, what is incorrect with the way people usage their browsers today, and can we invent a way to alleviate that problem?” And what that led to, for better or for worse, was quite a few tiny features and quite a few tiny ideas that make your day just a small bit better, save you a couple of clicks, that I think is built a very cult-like following in the software but has made it a bit besides unapproachable for the average individual in that it is simply quite a few fresh ideas.
That’s part of what we’re working on now: how do we strip distant quite a few the experiments that didn’t work or didn’t work as powerfully as we hoped they would to something a lot more focused and a lot more essential? Which, right now, is focused on how we do your busy work for you. due to the fact that people I think love our features, like erstwhile you’re playing a YouTube video and you click away, we automatically open a picture-in-picture player. Or if we announcement you have tabs open that you’ve had open for a long time that you haven’t used, let’s just tuck them distant neatly for you. And so we’re going to be focused on trimming down the product even more and truly effort and enhance the bit that does your busy work for you and has these small moments of delights.
That seems like the challenge. You have identified 1 set of users that already knows they’re utilizing a web browser as a productivity platform, that already knows that all their apps are in a web browser. And then there’s another class of users that is just utilizing Safari due to the fact that it’s what came on their Mac, and you’ve got to get more of those people in order to grow your user base. How do you balance the two? It feels like you already have the power user problem.
The way that we started building this product was through the lens of problem statements and that’s how we ended up with so many different solutions and so many different words. But I think the byproduct of that is 4 years later, I think we have a much crisper knowing for the average laptop individual — who, again, doesn’t know what a rendering engine is and honestly most likely isn’t reading The Verge and isn’t an early adopter — what are the most painful, annoying, tedious parts of their day on the internet? Where if we just focused on them they’d say, “Wait, I want that.”
I do think as much as there are any things that may be power user-y, there are also ideas in there that you talk to 10 out of 10 people in this demographic, and they go, “Yeah, I have 7 windows and 87 tabs, and it’s a mess, and it’s chaotic, and I feel overwhelmed.” And so we’re going to be focused on trying to build an antidote to a fewer circumstantial problems.
I feel like web apps in general require people to realize fresh metaphors. We frequently compose and talk about how younger people are not as aware of file systems as a concept — they grow up on iPhones and iPads and ChromeOS devices utilizing something like Figma, which requires a bunch of people to accept a bunch of fresh metaphors. And then you’re trying to change the metaphor around all of those metaphors. Is that going better or worse than you expected?
Honestly, it’s going better than I expected, but I think we’re going to hit a plateau. Our ambition truly is to change the way people usage the net and improve it. And if we truly want to scope out of that early adopter crowd, we gotta simplify. But I think 1 of the truly breathtaking things is the most-used text box on a Mac is the URL bar in Safari.
And so what we’ve realized is we kind of spread out and we built all these fresh surfaces and all these fresh nouns and all these fresh spaces, but if we just focus in on a fewer points that people are acquainted with and usage a lot like the text box, like the URL bar, there’s a lot that quite a few power we can pack in that.
And actually that Verge article shared a lot where, no, people don’t truly want to manually organize stuff in file systems anymore. They want to tell the computer what they need, and they want the computer to go get it for them. So, I think you’ll see us pack quite a few the ideas behind any of our power user features in a much more approachable and acquainted interface, which is the Command+T text box that you go to all the time to ask for things, now you can ask for a lot more.
Well, you started this full conversation by saying you were distraught that an election had been lost and computers were possibly liable or not, and the operating strategy is where the leverage is. How do you turn all of that into the leverage you’re seeking? Is it, “We’re not going to show you any websites.” Is it, “We’re going to make you have a healthier relation with Instagram?” Are you just going to pop up a informing that’s like “You’re on Instagram?” How do you actually usage the leverage of owning something that feels like an operating system?
In the same way that your background as a copyright lawyer informs quite a few the work that you do, I want to take a minute just to talk a small bit about my origin communicative due to the fact that it relates to the answer to the question. erstwhile I was a elder in college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was a sociology major, and I went to a lecture by a professor named Robert Putnam about his book Bowling Alone. After the lecture I went up to him, I said, “Professor Putnam, what should I do with my life?” He’s like, “I don’t know you, so I have no idea, but if you like my book, there’s an entrepreneur named Scott Heiferman that started a company in fresh York City called Meetup after he read the book. possibly you should go work for him.”
So, I went to get a occupation at Meetup, and on my first day of the internship, Scott gets up, and he says, “We’re going to turn distant from the banks, and we’re going to turn to each another on Kickstarter, and we’re going to turn distant from large box retailers, and we’re going to turn to each another on Etsy.” And he went on and on, and it was profoundly inspiring, and it was that part of me that fell in love with tech and the idealism behind it. To me, that shows 2 things: one, I have always been motivated by people at the another end, and two, Scott was totally wrong.
I love him,but I think, honestly, the part of me after the election that said, “I got to fix something, we got to do something, we got to fix democracy with technology” — I’m inactive an optimist; I inactive care about people, but I think we now have right-sized what our function should be, which is alternatively of saying in that moment, “How do we as any tech company with 20 people fix democracy or improve our civic society?” It’s just as worthy and ambitious to say, “My sister-in-law who’s a teacher and spends hours all day copying and pasting between different software to be a teacher, let’s get free of that busy work for her.” That is just as ambitious, and that’s just as worthy.
So, honestly, there’s kind of been this individual transformation from early ‘20s, the net is going to fix everything to, “Hey, let’s just make our friends and our household and our lives a small better all day.” So, don’t get me wrong, I inactive have that part of me that is as idealistic and hopeful that the web and the ideas behind the net can improve these top-level ideas, but we are much more curious in almost like the anthropological approach to “Nilay’s day, how do we make it a small bit better?” and find worth in that.
There’s a small bit of tension here. You described Arc as being an operating system. You evidently want, in any end state, for application vendors to be talking to Arc as an operating strategy and possibly leveraging any of your capabilities. You’re talking about end users making their lives better.
But you live on another operating system; the applications inside Arc or whatever another browser are doing whatever they’re going to do. How do you balance that role? It feels like there’s only 1 stakeholder whose experience you can actually improve or adjust, and Apple might just make it much harder for you due to the fact that you run on a Mac, or Microsoft is going to put Edge pop-ups all over Windows, or Figma is going to strike a deal with Chrome to usage any cutting edge API that you don’t have access to. There’s quite a few dependencies there. How are you balancing all that?
This is where I’m just a large believer in the web. As tricky a minute as it is in many ways, I believe the web has won, is winning, and will win. And I think in the web, there are adequate parties active and there are adequate incentives where it’s not truly about The Browser Company — it’s about betting that the web is an application platform, and the decentralized nature of it will mean that people will inactive keep building for the web.
As long as people are building applications for the web and the center of gravity — especially in this planet of AI, love it or hatred it, is heading even more to the web — I think there’s adequate incentives in the industry, in the ecosystem, to propose that if we build 1 user agent for it, there’s truly good work we can do there.
I want to talk about the web in detail, but I think this brings me to the Decoder questions. This is simply a large ambition. How large is The Browser Company now?
And how is that structured?
We have kind of functional teams — design, engineering — but we truly like to organize in profoundly cross-functional pods. So, we hire people that tend to be mutts, as we like to say in endearing ways. They come from different backgrounds with different skill sets beyond just whatever their title is, and then we put them together in these small pods of 5 people and give a prompt like, “How can we aid make the experience of Shopify sellers, how do we make it easier to usage their tools all day?” And we give them six weeks and say, “Go.” And they effort a bunch of things, and we see what happens.
When you have a prompt like that, do you say, “Okay, you came back, you have an answer. We’re going to go find a bunch of Shopify sellers and effort to marketplace Arc to them specifically.” Or is it, “We’re going to abstract the solution to a bunch of another usage cases and marketplace the abstract product that you’ve invented”?
It depends, but actually, it’s reversed in the order we do it. So, 1 of our first hires was a female named Adena [Nadler], and she runs a squad now called the membership team. So, what we start with is actually conversations with Shopify sellers, and we watch them usage their computers. We ask them about their problems, the things they do all day, and we actually effort to abstract solutions for them based on that.
Sometimes we focus on individual tools. So, we built this feature called GitHub Live Folders that, if you’re a software engineer and individual needs a code review from you, it’ll just automatically pop up and say, “Hey, Nilay needs you to review his code.” That’s something circumstantial for GitHub. And another times, we’ll take an thought and abstract it to something that can work everywhere.
We heard the communicative from a teacher last week actually, where she said she spends an hr all week taking attendance logs from a Google Sheet that she has and copy and pasting them into a school district-wide CMS of any kind for attendance records — and it takes her an hour. That makes me so mad. We can send reusable rockets to space apparently, but we have teachers spending an hr doing copy-paste, copy-paste, tab switching.
So, Nate on our squad last week prototyped this mass-paste thought where in 1 neglect swoop you can take a bunch of data from 1 tab and paste it in a very formatted structured way into another tab. So, there’s an example comparative to GitHub where the seed of the thought was this teacher with this very circumstantial part of software she has to usage for her very circumstantial job, but in it is this much larger relatable thought of we can all relate to copy and pasting back and distant between tabs incessantly. So, it’s a small bit of both, but it always starts with a person. It always starts with people and always starts with going out into the planet and trying to understand. Sometimes, it’s a household member. Sometimes, it’s a cousin. Sometimes, it’s a stranger. What are they experiencing on the web all day?
You’ve got kind of an interesting challenge there due to the fact that mass-paste seems beautiful abstract. “I’ve got 2 tabs, I’ve got 2 sources of data. I just request to decision them over.” possibly Chrome will build that feature — possibly they won’t. At least you’re competing with another browser entirely. With something like a GitHub notification, it seems likely that GitHub might build that feature and send you a notification to a mobile app or send you a notification to whatever web-based notification strategy that the manufacture will yet adopt. How do you think about that? That your features might get adopted by the very applications that you’re trying to support?
If you talk to these application developers, 1 of their complaints is actually browser vendors are beautiful restrictive about what they can do in the browser. So, 1 of our popular features is in our Command+T text box, you can kind “new Notion document,” and you can hit enter, and it’ll make a fresh Notion document. Notion loves that. Notion can’t do that in Chrome or Safari due to the fact that Google’s trying to defend its search ad revenue. So, there are examples of places where we’re actually giving developers more access than they would in another browsers due to the fact that we’re not optimizing for search ads. And then there are also examples where they’re actually things that you can only do at the browser layer that be across multiple tabs.
So, if you think about the teacher example, the things that the developer of Google Sheets and the obscure public school territory CMS application would request to do to have an integration, that’s never going to happen, but at the browser layer, due to the fact that we sit underneath all of it, we can actually do those things very easily. So, it evidently depends on the feature, but mostly speaking, due to the fact that another browsers are designed to be, essentially, large search boxes for the search ad business model, there hasn’t been as much innovation at the interface layer or the operating strategy level of a browser specified that application developers, I think, are very excited about the access that they will be able to have, and there are things we can do across web applications that would be hard otherwise.
You’re truly describing the browser as an application layer. This is the model for apps going forward, and you’re drawing a beautiful stark contrast to Google, which is “search for any stuff and we’ll show you any documents.” The web is in a minute of beautiful intense tension between these ideas. You mentioned AI — all the AI applications are deployed to the web due to the fact that they want to skip the app stores in 1 way or the other. Crypto, for better or worse, was mostly a web phenomenon due to the fact that they didn’t want to pay app store taxes, either. Do you think the web is headed toward being more of an application strategy as opposed to a paper retention system?
I’m curious, what do you think?
Well, I have quite a few feelings about the web as a publishing medium, but I think the pressures on the web as a publishing average are not insurmountable, but unavoidable and surely changing the economics of the business there. Whereas the pressures of app stores, on mobile phones in particular, are possibly devastating, and that’s why you see so many applications on the web. So, it feels like unless individual actively stops it, papers will decision off the web and applications will decision off the phone, but I’m not 100 percent certain it’s actually happening. You have a vantage point — I’m curious if you see it.
I would say unequivocally, putting aside my own feelings about it, that the web, since we started the company 5 years ago and the trend lines have continued, is becoming more and more of an application platform. I think that’s undeniable. I think it’s very exciting. I think it poses any problems in the context of publishing. I besides think, as you mentioned, there are these words, there are these phrases [like] application platform. My wife, in her job, has things she has to do. I don’t think it is going distant that sometimes she needs information, and actually, frequently she needs information.
So, I think what has changed is, as you know, the origins of the web, were a publishing platform — they’re actually closer to TikTok or Twitter in many ways than an application platform at the time. What has changed is that the mix has moved toward more applications, but the thought that as part of your job, as part of your individual life, you request to find something out or learn about something, that’s not going away. But I think the trend lines are toward it as an application platform.
Do you think that mix is shifting? If I were to start a tech website today, I most likely actually wouldn’t start a website. I would almost surely start a TikTok channel and just show people whatever I was covering. I see that as any amount of platform economics but besides quite a few web economics. The desire to put fresh information on the web first is fading, whereas the desire to deploy applications to the web is rising, and that mix is shifting, and possibly it feels like your full company is simply a consequence to that mix shifting, but I’m wondering if you actually see it day-to-day in how people are utilizing the browser.
Yes, absolutely. And in fact, keep in mind, I’m 33, I grew up on the desktop web. That’s where I got lost as a kid in my curiosities. And so, in fact, it’s been a process for me to admit to myself that this thing that I loved about the web and I wanted from the web that — if you look out again from a sociology, from a human position — we’re not seeing it as much. A thing you said that I besides think is actual and makes me so mad is, yes, if you are going to start, put a part of information out, you most likely should start a TikTok channel. I don’t like that, but I think that is true.
I think 1 of the interesting things, though, is if you go back to the origins of the web as a publishing platform, what we’ve learned about publishing platforms in retrospect is it missed 2 large things: distribution and discovery. We now know that the most powerful part of any publishing platform is discovery, and the web publishing platform didn’t have that built-in. Google’s a hack in many ways for that. TikTok’s a hack for that.
The second thing it didn’t have baked in is payments. Can you imagine the iOS ecosystem If Apple didn’t have native payments that were easy and seamless? Think about what that’s done for subscriptions and purchasing apps. Yes, there are quite a few challenges with 30 pecent taxes, but it enabled this thriving marketplace. And so if I look at the trajectory of the mix shift on the web toward applications, there are reasons people are rushing toward it.
And if I look at the reasons that information or publishing has faded, I think it can truly come down to those 2 missing elements. I want I knew what you could do about that because, again, the web is simply a decentralized protocol, but I think you can look at those 2 factors and explain a lot. I’m curious if you agree or if you have thought about that.
Well, I agree on the diagnosis. I’m not certain what the cure is, but I asked you that question due to the fact that if the browser is the operating strategy and you control that, well, you could be the Apple that introduces a payments layer to the web. Famously, Marc Andreessen thought the web would be powered by micropayments erstwhile he did Netscape, and it just never occurred, and then crypto arrived, and we had to perceive to it.
Probably not the right idea, but the thought is cyclical. The thought that we’ll have payments on the web in any way is cyclical. And if you are controlling the browser, I’m wondering if that’s something you could introduce to fix the document-side model of it or if you’re staying focused on the application side?
I would love nothing more than to get active with that. due to the fact that another thing we think about are the fundamental economics of browsers and the web itself, which is so dependent on ads, and I think, often, these conversations are binary “ads are bad” or “[ads are] good.” That’s not what I’m saying, but I think there’s so much more possible in the ways that browsers and publishers to the web and applications to the web could monetize if payments were built in. I think that’s highly exciting. It’s a large example of somewhere where it’s kind of a win-win-win. If you make payments easier, the individual’s happy due to the fact that it’s easier to make payments — you don’t gotta pull out your credit card. The merchant’s happy due to the fact that you grease the wheels — it’s easier to have transactions, and whoever’s connecting the 2 is making money as well. So, I find payments fascinating. I think it could do so much good for the web.
The flip side of believing in the web is we are a minnow. We’re barely a minnow, and so 1 of the interesting tensions we feel in this conversation — I’m certain we’ll talk about Arc Search — is we’ve got ideas we’re excited, but we’re not at Chrome scale, we’re not at Safari scale. So if we always have the privilege of getting to a place where our voice can decision the ecosystem in any way, I think adding payments natively to the browser in that layer of the stack would do wonders for the ecosystem. And I hope that we or individual else gets there due to the fact that I think it would be fantastic.
How does The Browser Company make money today?
We don’t presently charge for anything, but we, as part of this kind of 2.0 product that’s coming out soon, we’re going to be charging individuals and businesses for a plan that does more of your busy work for you than the default plan. But we don’t have anything concrete to announce.
So a subscription. A subscription browser is where we’re going.
When you say plan, that usually means recurring revenue, not “we’re going to sale you a browser 1 time for $49 in a box.”
Yeah. So, the honest answer is we don’t have the circumstantial details yet, but what we are certain of is we want an exchange of value, which is we do your busy work for you, we save you time, we save you clicks, we aid you through your day, and either you or your employer pays us. Whether or not that is through a subscription model or a usage-based or any kind of token strategy is something we’re inactive figuring out, but we’re truly excited about the ambition to say, “Hey, can you truly save that much time for individual that either them or their boss would fork over money for it?”
What are the pros and cons of the different choices?
A very long conversation, but I think subscription is easier in many ways. It’s more familiar. What I truly like about something closer to usage-based pricing is that I truly want a direct exchange of value. I want it to feel as much like the more you usage it, the more you pay us due to the fact that the more value we’re delivering to you.
There’s any tricky things to think about in terms of you besides want people to truly make a habit with your product due to the fact that they have all this inertia from Chrome and Safari, and you don’t want to push people distant from utilizing it more and more. But I’m assured or at least hopeful that we can get around that. We’re always going to have a free plan. We hope to put as much in the free plan as possible, but it’s a tricky one.
Other CEOs have gotten in lots of problem on the show suggesting that they will make something that was previously free into a subscription product. Do you have any hesitation there?
There’s nothing in the product present that we are going to charge people for. So we’re truly excited about this next evolution. How can we take the thought behind this automatic picture-in-picture player automatically cleaning up and managing your tabs for you? Can we take that to the utmost and do more and more busy work for you, specified that that additional time savings, that additional work we take off your plate, that additional tedious, monotonous stuff that you gotta do and you no longer gotta do, you can imagine any of that being stuff that we charge for.
Also, this is simply a danger of doing this in individual due to the fact that I was not expected to talk about this, but you loosened me up a small bit, so I’m going to get in problem for talking about this later.
That’s why we bring people to the office. I just want to stick on it a small bit longer. So, you’ve got products today. You’ve got Arc Search and the Arc Browser. Will Arc Search be paid on the phone?
That is not presently the plan. And it’s worth noting we truly think of Arc Search as the companion app to the desktop product. So, we definitely have a challenge with words and branding as a subject I’m taking from this conversation, but the intention of Arc Search: it is the mobile browser to the desktop browser.
Sure. Arc Search is an AI product. I want to talk about that a small bit, but the economics of AI products are beautiful simple. individual does a search in Arc Search. You gotta go talk to a cloud provider, do any inference and come back — that costs you money. If you intend to keep it free, how much money can you spend before you gotta change your mind?
So, our intention is that the paid offering — which, again, we’ll apply on mobile, too, not the Arc Search that you see today, but the additional functionality on top of it — is what will subsidize the free version for folks.
So, then the goal is you make useful free versions and people convert to the paid?
Yeah. What people do in Arc present doesn’t actually cost us all that much money, and our ambition is to make this free for as many people as possible. As we get into more AI inference-intensive tasks for people that take off more and more busy work, that’s where… I think we want to be a sustainable business that exists for a long time — it’s about time — but besides I think the costs get more prohibitive.
You’re evidently competing with Google. Google loves to give things distant for free. That search ad gross is simply a cash device basically. That search ad gross is simply a cash device for them. How do you think about competing against a competitor that will undercut you on price in the most ruthless way possible, which is giving it distant for free?
In any sense, it’s terrifying. We have, on paper, absolutely no advantage. They have more money. They have more people. They have more all of the things. I think over time, as we’ve built more and more features and gotten this question more and more, I think what we’re realizing is if we’re truly going to build the successor to the browser, what comes after it — I’m going to avoid branding it since I’ve branded besides many things — that is truly a holistic rethinking of our interface to the internet. I think that, and the care and the item that goes into that, is not as simple as popping on an AI sidebar chat onto Chrome. There are examples of another browser vendors that have clearly taken ideas from us and done their own versions of it, and it hasn’t gotten in the way of our growth or success so far.
So, I think if you look at it from a top-down perspective, how are we going to beat Google or Apple or Microsoft? It’s tricky to give you an answer that is convincing. I think the lived experience so far is that we keep our heads down, we optimize for building something that people love and truly helps them in their day-to-day, and we think about this from a blank-page position of not “what did browsers do yesterday?” but “how can we build a cohesive day on the net that saves you time and does your busy work for you?”
I think it’ll be hard for the another vendors to just bolt that onto their existing products. Now at any scale, might they do what happened to Slack with Teams? Of course, we’re in a capitalistic society — that will happen. I think there is the area for us to run if we are focused and we are fast and we truly do what we’re best at, but time will tell.
There’s the Chrome of it. There’s besides the Safari of it. Apple truly wants people to usage its integrated applications, peculiarly on mobile. Do you find that trying to ship a fresh browser on an iPhone is simply a lost cause? Do you think that that is simply a marketplace you can actually get into, or is that just closed off to you?
I think the fascinating thing about Safari in general is that Safari — and we have this on good sources — is the most utilized application in the Apple ecosystem. More time is spent in Safari than any another application. But if you go look at the size of the squad and the things they’re working on, there’s a mismatch there due to the fact that Apple doesn’t want the center of gravity to decision toward the web on desktop.
On mobile, it’s more hard due to the fact that the browser plays a different role. On desktop, it is increasingly the application environment, and on mobile, it’s a place where you go to rapidly look something up, get any information truly quickly, rapidly read an article. And there’s any things that Apple does or doesn’t do that makes it more difficult.
They don’t let you bring keychain passwords over. It’s more hard to check out. And so there are any structural challenges created by Apple on iPhones that make it more difficult. But I’d say the bigger thing is the function of the browser on your telephone is that it’s almost a different product than what it is on desktop, and that’s the thing that we think about the most. But I think as we’ve seen with Arc Search, there is simply a desire if you build something truly fresh for people to change, and it’s just a question of what is the ceiling there on mobile versus desktop?
This brings me to the another Decoder question. You have quite a few challenges. You’ve got immense browser competitor that gives distant its product for free. You’ve got operating systems that will and will not let you do certain things. You’ve got the changing nature of the browser itself. You’ve got pricing to figure out. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?
I knew you’re going to ask this question due to the fact that you always ask this question. I want I had a framework. We think of our work as optimizing for feelings and instinct. I don’t know if this is simply a consequence to the technology manufacture that I was brought up in where you’re expected to be neutral and unopinionated and have frameworks, but our approach is: What are we trying to express here? What feels right to us? What do we want to do for ourselves and our parents and our siblings and people that we care profoundly about?
So, generally, of course, we have a data discipline team. We look at the data, we reason in all the ways that we should, but I think at the end of the day, [you have a] large decision to make, I’d say it’s more of a individual expression and a individual reflection of our hopes, wishes, and desires for our work than it is anything else.
One of the comparisons you made was to Google. You said it’s not just as easy as bolting on an AI chat box to the side of the browser. I could be beautiful reductive, and I could say, “You’ve just described Google shipping its org chart. There’s a Chrome product manager. There’s a Gemini product manager. Just be next to each other. Don’t integrate the product.”
That sounds like you’re betting on Google not figuring it out, to any extent. The Google product culture will ship and kill things in the way the Google product culture does, and it will never make the turn toward integrating the AI products. You can feel nevertheless you want about that bet. I’m certain the people at Google feel any way about that bet, but is that what you’re thinking, that they’re large and slow and you can actually just be more nimble?
It’s worth noting I think the people at Google are very smart, and I’m not just saying that as what I’m expected to say. I truly believe that. We hired Darin Fisher, who started Chrome and ran Chrome for 16 years. He worked at The Browser Company. It’s more about the incentive structure. I like to think a lot about incentives. It’s 1 of the things I want I thought about more earlier in my career.
There’s a communicative that Darin told me that truly stuck with me, which is Chrome had this thought that, erstwhile you go to the “new tab” page (one of the most popular surfaces in any part of software you use), if they show you an icon for the webpage that you go to a lot, you might be able to announcement it much more rapidly — “Oh, it’s the Twitter icon. I’ll click on Twitter — versus just a screenshot of the webpage. And they ship that, and overnight, Google search ad gross dropped by 5 percent, and they weren’t certain why. It was this large freak out. Now, that resolved in the way that it did, but that is the kind of thing that you gotta contend with if you—
Because people were no longer doing navigational searches for Twitter?
Yeah, due to the fact that they don’t want you to go to Twitter; they want you to go to search. Now, the Chrome squad doesn’t — the Chrome squad wants you to get to Twitter as fast as you can, but at a company like Google, in this moment, in the public markets, in this minute of AI even more, there are these incentives with the search ad model and the way that Chrome and the search ecosystem works so far that are just a huge… it’s inertia.
So, it’s not just shipping the org chart; having worked at Facebook, there are real challenges there. But I think on top of that, there is the incentive structure of how the company makes money and has for a long time. And then there’s besides the risk. If you think about it, if we start with a blank page, if you give me the most generous reading of everything I said, it may not work, and if it does, we don’t only request it to work for a 100 million people.
If we do something radically different and we find a 100 million people that love what we do, that is simply a raging success. For Google that’s an utter failure, and that’s if it goes right. So, I think there’s besides the hazard aversion to the scale they request to hit the number of people it needs to work for to be worthy, putting aside all of the product hazard that comes with doing something truly new.
Google’s in a state of what I would call regulatory scrutiny. They just lost the antitrust case against the United States Department of Justice that said there was an illegal monopoly in search and in certain part of its ad business. The ad tech part of its business is going to an antitrust trial very shortly here. As part of the search trial, we found out that Google’s paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine. This stuff feels like it’s coming apart.
There are opportunities here. Which of those opportunities is most right for The Browser Company, and how are you going to attack them?
Candidly, the way I think about it is there’s more force on them not to do anticompetitive practices or things that can be perceived that way. So, I think there are quite a few subtle things that these players do that make it harder for an upstart like us to compete. So, I would say it’s little a circumstantial decision, though these are all large in their own right, and more mostly that there are eyes on these companies not to do things that are monopolistic or perceived to be monopolistic, and that culture and climate, I think, is advantageous to people like us.
Do you think the Department of Justice should break up Google?
How would you break up Google?
Come on, Nilay. You’re a lawyer. That is way above…
[Laughs] That is way above…
Well, there’s an apparent answer here, which is divided out Chrome, which has been floated. Do you think you would have a better chance against the independent Chrome company?
I’m not a lawyer. I have no idea. But what I—
I’m asking you competitively. If Chrome did not have the force of Google search — you can put in the Twitter icon or whatever application icon without hurting the search gross — do you think you’d have a better shot at competing with an independent Chrome?
Honestly, hard to say. I’m not trying to be evasive. I honestly don’t know.
Do you think that the deals Google has been making to make its search engine the default in different places, if they came to you and said, “We’ll pay you $20 billion a year to set Google search as the default in Arc,” would you take the money?
$20 billion was an unfair number to pick.
$5. We’re just going to keep going by fives. $10. Would you say yes to $10?
Maybe this comes back. possibly I should—
Maybe I should have a framework for optimizing for this stuff, but at the end of the day, I just want my day on the internet.
Just at the end of the day, Nilay, I want my quality of life on the net to be much, much better.
Do you take money to set a default in search on Arc?
The default presently is Google.
You got to make a telephone call, man. The money’s on the table.
That may or may not change soon.
The default, or the money?
No, we are not going to… If we take money for the default search engine, then yet our customers, our search engines and advertisers, and that is conflicting to why we started the company, what we set out to do.
However, I do think 1 of the things that is very breathtaking about this minute in AI, alongside all the challenging things, is AI has this ability to way us to different places more intelligently and take us more straight to places we want to go that are not always Google, and oftentimes, it’s never Google. So, we’re going to replace the default search engine, but not with another search engine that’s…
One example I like to think of is I just moved to a fresh place in Brooklyn, and I was trying to decide if we should buy a HomePod. Valerie and I love to dance around the home and we didn’t have a speaker. I want to kind in “The Verge HomePod review.” If I hit enter, that takes me to Google. In our 2.0 product, if you hit enter, that’ll just take me to The Verge’s HomePod review.
So, there are things that we can do in this minute that weren’t possible before that I think make Google susceptible both in search and browsers. That means this question of default search engine is no longer just going to be Google vs. Bing and who’s going to pay you. It can be, “Let’s take you to the exact right place based on what you’re looking for.”
So, you’re building a search-like functionality.
Again, it may sound tired, but the way we think about this is what are the things you request to do all day? There are these fresh technologies that make it more possible to blur the lines between what is simply a browser, a search engine, into something that more holistically end-to-end helps individual do something.
And yes, as part of that, erstwhile you kind in the most popular text box on your computer, we can now take you and way you to lots of different places that oftentimes are much more direct and on the nose for what you want and don’t just funnel you into the Google ecosystem due to the fact that that’s how it’s always worked, due to the fact that that’s what their business model is.
One of the things we’ve seen a lot with AI in general, and you’re surely talking about it now, is the thought that that text box, Command+T, is actually the user interface of your computer. You’re going to just tell the computer what you want, and the computer is going to go off and do it. And if you have the full web behind you, you can do quite a few things, especially if you can take actions on web applications.
Are you trying to build that kind of automation layer where you say, “Hey, just go to my calendar and bring all the dates out and put them over here?”
Yes. Again, you’re getting me in a mode where I’m sharing more than I should. But we have this interior prototype I tried last week where my boy had his first day of preschool today. They sent us a PDF, which I opened in my browser with all the different dates for holidays and whatnot, and I could say, in 1 gesture, add all of these to my calendar, and it would do that.
And so what we’re doing is building the layer underneath all the applications to realize what is going on in your life, what are you looking at right now, what have you been working on previously, and the connective tissue between all of the applications and tabs that you usage and trust on, and on top of that, we can take quite a few busy work like that off of your plate much more easily.
And sometimes, that’ll come through Command+T, and I’ll ask it. And another times, if I’m on Apple looking at a HomePod, we might say, “Hey, you truly like The Verge. You read The Verge a lot. Here’s the HomePod review.” So, I’m utilizing the text box as, yes, the most popular interface, but I think it should feel like your full experience on the web is more personalized and more proactive to you, not just erstwhile you explicitly ask for something.
This thought that a robot’s going to go click around the web for you is very popular. We’ve seen a number of startups say they can do it. I don’t think they’re actually doing it, but they say they’re going to take AI and do it. Then, there’s just a set of follow-on problems to this.
The browser has to see everything in all of the websites. It has to see my data, it has to read that data, it has to interpret it presumably utilizing an AI strategy in a cloud somewhere. It has to click on things for me without getting anything wrong, and then it has to not hallucinate. That’s quite a few steps. How do you defend people’s data and actually hit the level of, essentially, 100 percent reliability that people are going to request from products like this?
The first thing is we truly think about right-sizing AI. There’s quite a few discourse about AI right now, and it tends to be of the martini-sipping version where we’re going to replace teachers and doctors and there’s going to be the superintelligence being, and that’s, in our opinion, not the right way to think about this stuff.
I think the equivalent there as it relates to clicking is you’re going to tell the computer what you want to do and it’s just going to do a bajillion things for you with 100 percent accuracy. Today, that’s not possible. That’s not how it’s going to work. But what is possible is in these tiny ways, again, saying “add these to my calendar,” we can do that, and we can do that with close to 100 percent reliability.
Our approach is — as much as possible, which is increasingly very possible, especially on high-end MacBooks — doing that on-device. Data does not leave your device — it’s all done locally and, erstwhile it can’t be done locally, making certain that the individual says, “Hey, I’m okay with that tradeoff of sending the contents of this PDF to an LLM supplier in order to add it to my calendar” and let them make that decision.
But I think the large point here is what we are not saying is the robots are going to do all of your work for you. That is not our belief, but what it can do is it can save people from quite a few the mundanity that relates to futzing around with boxes on the net all day.
Do you think that that is simply a separate set of usage cases from what Arc Search is doing?
Absolutely. In fact, Arc Search was truly a first prototype. There’s so many things that I want we’d done differently and we’ve now since learned, but really, that was the first experimentation of this larger thought of us playing with this fresh Play-Doh, which is, “Okay, we can click on things for you. We can read things for you. Wow. We definitely can’t… the writing’s truly bad. Oh, but interestingly, we can transform 1 kind of data format into another kind of data format.” Just feeling out the edges of what it can do today.
As part of that, 1 tiny thing that you do is you want to find out a fast answer to… I got a skirt steak the another day, and the guy at the butcher was like, “You should make chimichurri sauce.” I don’t know how to make chimichurri sauce, and sometimes I want to know that. A lot more frequently, there’s something for my occupation or my livelihood where I gotta go click a bunch of buttons in the same order all single time. I think we’re much more excited about doing that kind of busy work for you because, candidly, that’s what people complain about the most erstwhile we interview them about their jobs.
“I want to make chimichurri sauce” is simply a large example due to the fact that what Arc Search will do is it’ll go read a bunch of webpages, it’ll summarize them, it’ll show you the answer with any links. That is simply a very controversial decision across the web right now. erstwhile I say there’s quite a few force on the web as a paper or consumption medium, that’s the pressure.
In particular, a bunch of AI companies are scraping the hell out of the web, remixing the web, and the people who actually made the information are getting nothing for it. Arc Search is right in the mediate of that. That is the thing you are doing. Do you think that that is simply a sustainable thing to do?
No. And I think this is simply a truly complicated one, so I want to effort to share both sides, and let’s take it head on. That’s part of the reason I’m here. From the position of an individual, I want the chimichurri recipe, I show up to the website, I got 17 trackers tracking me all of a sudden. I get a newsletter pop-up saying, “Do you want to subscribe to our newsletter?” I wade through 5 paragraphs about the author’s grandma and the past of her chimichurri recipe, and all the way at the bottom is the recipe.
That doesn’t feel good to the individual. It feels like we can do better, and it feels like for beautiful much everyone that uses the web, a much better thing would be, “I want to know the ingredients and the recipe steps. Get it to me as rapidly as possible.” And on the another side, it breaks the model of the web historically.
Now I think we are not going around any paywalls. We are not training our own models. quite a few the stuff that I think is more problematic is not anything that we do, but I do think it’s fair to say that those trackers, as much as I feel like they’re unfair to me as an individual, are part of how that recipe site makes money. The fact that they show ads — which, if we are reading the sites on your behalf, you’re not seeing — it breaks that model in any way.
So, this is simply a minute where I’m an optimist. I think it’s a very breathtaking minute for publishers and media companies due to the fact that for the first time… so much of this is dictated by Google and the way that Chrome and Google Search has worked for so long. So, I think something’s got to change. I think publishers gotta get paid. I want I had an easy answer for you, but I definitely don’t think it’s sustainable. Even if I besides think for the individual, we got to do better as well.
In February, my friend Casey Newton wrote about Arc Search. He said he felt a uncommon emotion and “a kind of revulsion at the app’s specified existence and what it portends due to the fact that it’s taking the value from the people who compose the recipe website.” And I could do a full hr on why there’s a communicative at the top of all recipe website. That is the way that the money is made.
It’s the incentives of the system, absolutely.
You can’t sale the recipes for a variety of reasons, so you got to sale something else. You can sale ad inventory around the recipes. Do you realize why Casey felt the revulsion? I know he talked to you for that piece.
And he talked to you, and the quote is, “Miller had not put much thought into the second order implications of a planet where search queries no longer consequence in outbound clicks.” That was February. It’s September. Have you thought about it since?
Yes. Actually as late as last week, I had a conversation with David [Pierce] at The Verge. I thought we were doing a good occupation of citations. He read me the riot act on the fact that we weren’t, and in the app today, we have citations even more prominently than I thought was the most prominent app out there that shows what we read, put them at the top, you can click them easily.
We’re besides having a bunch of conversations with media companies right now. At the end of the day, I think media companies request to get paid and publishers request to get paid. And I think the fact is, as you know, the scale of that will not mean that it works for everybody, but we are trying our best behind the scenes and out front to be better here.
Candidly, 1 of the challenges we have is we don’t have the scale of another players in the space. So, if we show up at a media company’s website and say, “Hey, let’s figure something out here. Let’s figure out how we can pay you,” we don’t always get the same receptivity as what I presume another companies do. But I’m curious what you think about the OpenAI model for this, due to the fact that we’re kind of seeing this all from afar. But I think what I come back to is I’ve been on the board of Patreon for 5 years, and I think you know better than anyone I don’t think the old model was working for anyone, even before all this AI stuff.
I think you make a large point that AI accelerates it and it hurts it, but I think the old model wasn’t working. What I do think this fresh technology provides is simply a way for all of us to rethink everything from the products themselves — the media products, the software products — all the way to the business models. And I’m curious, for Vox, how you’ve thought about that and how you think about it in the context of OpenAI and these publishers that are doing that.
Happily, my function in the newsroom is to spend money. I don’t make any money. It’s a real problem for this full company. We’ve had Nick Thompson talk about his deal from The Atlantic on the show. His view is we request to get this money, and OpenAI is offering us a bunch of stuff in exchange for this money, including tokens and credits to usage their systems to build fresh products.
What I see, and possibly it’ll work out, but what I see is we are absolutely hastening the demise of the web as a publishing platform due to the fact that we’re making it easier and easier and easier to extract value without any payment or compensation going in the another direction. And eventually, all those people are just going to say, “Well, at least there’s a creator fund on TikTok. At least there’s YouTube payments. At least there’s another platforms with any built-in way to compensate me for my work.”
Whereas on the web, everyone just takes everything away. large publishers left and right are saying, “Well, at least Apple News exists. We’ll just take that money.” I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But the subject of this conversation is the web is increasingly an application platform. We can tailor the browser to it being an application platform.
And over here, the part where people browse the web for information, possibly we can extract value from that and that will go away. Or possibly it’ll just be a fistful of preferred providers that OpenAI pays or Perplexity pays or you pay. But that open web, the part where there’s just information on the web for people to click around and look at, that seems like there’s nothing here that indicates it can make a resurgence.
The another thing, too, is we talk about the web or publishing like it’s 1 large category. But for example, if you go to a local restaurant in my fresh vicinity and they have a reservation booking tool, I’m certain they’re totally fine with the thought that an AI strategy might come around and make a reservation more easy for people. So, that one’s easy.
I truly believe what you or Ezra Klein said on that podcast about this thought of a flight to quality. I’ve never listened or engaged with The Verge more, and I foretell that across mediums — TikTok, podcasts — I think that will only continue. And my hunch is that things like “browse for me” or OpenAI or Perplexity, that’s not going to replace the HomePod review that I trust on before making a purchase.
I’m very bullish on that. I’m curious if you’re not, but I am very bullish on that. There is this mediate tier of content and content providers that we might call fast facts or more commodity kind content, where, candidly as you know, most of those or any large percent of those are content farms, or they’re contractors that are just churning stuff out or copying stuff or AI-generated. I think it’s that mediate layer, that mediate layer of, “I want to know what Sauvignon Blanc tastes like due to the fact that I don’t know anything about wine, but I’m at the wine store.” That, to me, is the tricky one. I think The Verge is good and going to be better. I truly, truly believe that.
So, I think, in many ways, Casey’s revulsion comment, evidently that hurts and it hits, especially after speaking with him. I think it is fair in many ways, but I think it truly hits on 1 percent of the content. I’m optimistic for what will happen to the media at that end of the spectrum, but possibly that’s ignorance. But again, I’m curious from The Verge, my presumption is this Decoder podcast, I would bet that the ad slots are sold out for the remainder of the year.
But I look at the platforms, and I have the extraordinary privilege of getting to say that I’m a precious writer and I have no thought what’s happening with the ads and I won’t read them and we inactive get to sit in a fancy studio due to the fact that I have a full company, and the economics of social platforms are not large for that.
You have individual creators who cannot support a giant company, who are in bed with the companies they cover. I’m not even naming names — just broadly, they do the brand deals, they read the ads, they mix the commerce and the content in a way that journalists do not do or should not do. And I say, “Well, the web supported the another model for a minute, and now possibly the flight to quality is simply a bunch of paywalls.” And what we’re going to be left with is simply a bunch of free content on platforms that is corrupted in any way by the commercialization of the work due to the fact that the rates aren’t advanced enough.
And somewhere in there is, “Well, we’re just going to let it happen due to the fact that the web is an application platform and not a paper platform, and we never figured out how to actually sustainably distribute this information in a way that works for everyone.” It feels like there’s quite a few chance to make the web a better application platform, but it feels like if you turn that all the way, you do end up with a bunch of weird ads on TikTok and a bunch of paywalls on the web.
Again, possibly I’m just besides much of an optimist, but I think that it’s going to take creativity and dreaming on both sides. I think from a media standpoint, tell me if you think this is wrong, I think quite a few media organizations made the mistake, possibly a decade ago, of trusting the platforms and, in many ways, outsourcing their product development.
I don’t think media companies are going to make that mistake again. And I think there are many, like The Verge, that are innovating on what their product is, and they’re innovating on what their product is in a minute where there’s actually leverage to go after these… I can’t overstate, not to you, but to your audience, how stuck the web has been. And all of these things have been for decades due to the fact that Google controlled it all. For the first time in decades, there is this technology, this Play-Doh, that gives a window to mess that up at a minute where you all—
And you think that technology is AI, to be clear.
Yes. In a minute where you all have been burned as media companies by outsourcing your product to Facebook saying, “Hey, trust us. Just give us your content. We’ll pay you. It’ll be great.” You’re not going to make that mistake again. You have Play-Doh to play with. You are innovating on product. And I think on our side, I knew, coming on this podcast, you were going to ask these questions, and I knew I wasn’t going to have a perfect answer, but I think this is crucial for the same reason I think it’s crucial to choice up David’s call, hear him kindly yell at me, and make changes based on it. And it’s why we show up at media companies offices saying, “Hey, let’s collaborate on something here. Let’s figure out a way where we pay you.”
It’s going to take experimentation. It’s going to take collaboration on both sides. And I think that collaboration bit is the hardest bit due to the fact that there are bits of what Casey said that I found profoundly unfair, and there are bits of it that I found fair, but I know where he’s coming from due to the fact that it’s the same part of me that was burned as a 20-year-old by these promises of “tech’s going to change everything.”
We have the minute in history, which we should not take for granted. We have the Play-Doh, we have the lessons from the past, and now we just got to dream a bit and come together in any way. And possibly this is the part of me that makes decisions through feelings, and this is naive, but I truly, truly think something good is going to come out of this, but I think we’re going to mess any things up. Everyone’s going to mess any things up, and we got to be open about it and talk about it.
And I think there is this generation of entrepreneurs both in the media space and in the product space or the technology space that has seen, again, the models that came before it and what went incorrect there and is encouraged to come on a podcast like this, even if it’s not always going to be effortless.
That is simply a good and optimistic place to end it, so I’m going to ask 1 more question.
The thought that the web will come into balance and the web will endure, I want to believe. I am a web individual at heart. I proceed to run a website in 2024. That is just a individual decision that I’ve made. What is the chance that the web actually turns all the way into an application platform, that that dominates the next generation of the web?
I think very low. And I will request media training from you after this. As individual that is full of ideas and prototypes and we have an experimental culture, there’s nothing I want to do more than blurt out all of these ideas for what might turn it back. I think I request to learn my lesson of the folks that came before me and say, “I don’t know the answer yet.”
It is hard to imagine looking at the state of things present as we’ve spoken about, but I think there is any innovation on the product side, both from the media side and the technology side, that can turn those tides. due to the fact that I think, again, from the Patreon perspective, everyone is burned. Everyone is overwhelmed. They are burnt out. It is just not sustainable. And I think out of that will come a generative creativity that can bring it back. And I think the fact of these another historical platforms is they have these taxes, and they have these anticompetitive behaviors, they have these things that I think will work against them, and the web has a lot going for it.
So, if it’s okay, can I ask you 1 question?
A birdie told me that of your Vergecast hosts, David Pierce uses Arc, Alex Cranz uses Arc. Nilay Patel does not usage Arc. Why don’t you usage Arc, and what can we do better?
I started utilizing Arc in preparation for this episode. I just got to usage it more. I think, unlike my Vergecast cohosts, I am reticent to actually depend on software. I think there’s a danger in being dependent on software or a workflow, and possibly that’s due to the fact that I’ve had quite a few software in my life go away. So, I’m a very manual brute force kind of person. And the thought that I’ll quit any part of my workflow or my process to a tool has always frightened me, but I’ll keep trying.
Which browser do you use?
Obviously, I usage Chrome and Safari, and now I’m utilizing Arc.
Oh, you can’t usage Chrome. We’re having the conversation about the future of the web, and you’re inactive on Chrome? Come on.
We are a Google Docs company. We are a Riverside company.
Well, more than that. I hope out of this, I hope there is any kind of collaboration we can do. Jim Bankoff, if you’re listening, let’s do something. It’s going to be great.
I promise you that’s the another side of the house. I’ll make the introduction for you.
Okay, awesome. Thanks for having me, Nilay.
Thanks for coming on, Josh. This was great.
Decoder with Nilay Patel /
A podcast from The Verge about large ideas and another problems.
