Beyond the immediate AI automation story lies a more fundamental challenge that most agency strategies don’t yet address: the emergence of the agentic web.
The Advertising Model Crisis:
When AI agents become primary content consumers, the attention economy collapses. An AI agent scraping data for analysis has zero interest in clicking on a banner ad or being influenced by sponsored content.
The Attention Economy Paradox:
As we build more sophisticated tools to help humans navigate information overload, we simultaneously erode the economic foundation that funds information’s creation and distribution.
New KPIs for the AI Era:
Legacy Metric (Obsolete)
New Metric (Machine Consumption)
CPM
CPC (Cost Per Crawl)
CPC
CPDU (Cost Per Data Used)
CTR
CPTO (Cost Per Task Outcome)
Impressions
DFP (Data Freshness Premium)
Early Signal: Cloudflare’s cost-per-crawl model — monetizing data access frequency, volume consumed, quality, and outcome-based pricing.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
