Op-ed by Brian Bergstrom
Creator of My Buckhannon & XtraXtra
Since its earliest days, the open internet has operated on a basic, unwritten agreement — a symbiotic relationship between creators and platforms, a give-and-take that fostered an unprecedented information age.
And it’s about to end.
For decades, the single most important relationship on the internet was the one between Google and the hundreds of millions of people who collectively contributed the information that made up the World Wide Web.
Google helped people discover content. In return, creators made that content accessible. Google got rich selling ads on search results. Content creators built audiences, sold ads on their own sites, earned affiliate commissions, put up paywalls. It was never perfect, but it worked.
Take a simple example. A photographer spends days testing the new Canon R5 camera, writing a detailed review and including a purchase link that earns them a small commission. Ask Google about the Canon R5, and you would find a link to that review, alongside a few ads. You might read the review and buy the camera, and the reviewer would make a few bucks.
That balance — truly the very foundation of the modern internet — collapsed almost overnight with the rise of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT and other contemporary AI systems vacuum up vast amounts of content, summarize it, and serve up an answer — usually without linking to or even crediting the original source. The creators who produced and funded that content? It’s like they don’t exist.
Ask ChatGPT about a Canon R5 camera, and it gives you an answer. But guess what? ChatGPT didn’t buy the camera. It didn’t go to an NFL game to test it. It just took someone else’s work and pretended it was its own.
That’s not sustainable. The symbiotic relationship that created the modern internet is breaking down, and if creators stop creating, the web will be nothing more than an echo chamber of endlessly recycled ideas.
When we started building XtraXtra, we saw this coming. Generative AI is here to stay, and it’s an incredible technology. But it’s also rewriting the rules of how information flows — and who gets rewarded for creating it.
That means we’re going to need a new kind of relationship.
At its core, XtraXtra is about creating a connection between the creator and the customer. Unlike traditional paywalls, XtraXtra lets you support writers directly on a per-story basis — simple, transparent and built for small-town journalism as much as national voices.
We consider XtraXtra a “store of stories.” You go to the store, buy a story, read the story. It’s a simple economic relationship that has stood the test of time for millennia.
Some people wonder why everything on the internet isn’t just free. But the truth is, nothing is free, and any impression otherwise is an illusion. The internet was subsidized by ads, algorithms and your data. With XtraXtra, we’re choosing a different path: direct support from readers to writers.
I’ll be blunt: If we want the next chapter of the internet to be worth reading, we have to start paying the people who write it.
Join us at xtraxtra.news.
