Like Part 1, this originally appeared in my newsletter. If something doesn’t make sense being on this website, that’s why.
While it wasn’t my intention to make this a multi-part series, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive with one very important missing piece:
Awesome, websites need to evolve. That’s great, but Google and Facebook killed distribution, so how will people find my site at all?
To answer that, we have to first address one of the silent toxins that slowly plagued the web’s bloodstream: display ads.
Not only did we allow big tech to manipulate us into creating content for their platforms rather than for our true audience, we also slowly allowed our sites to look like the graffiti inside a rest area bathroom stall.
Websites have become so littered with ads that they’re not just ugly, but many of them are literally unusable. Like all things, little by little, we made a compromise… then another compromise… then another one until our sites became unrecognizable dumps.
Then we ask users to pretty please visit our sites instead of getting information directly from a chatbot with zero ads?
People have principles until money or convenience is involved. They’re not going to navigate your junky version of the same info they can get without playing the incredibly fun game tentatively titled “try to read this paragraph before the ad reloads and shifts the page.”
I’m saying this because we slowly, over time, accepted this monetization world where X ads and Y traffic equated to Z dollars. And when traffic was in abundance, that worked fairly well and I can see why it evolved that way.
But it did something awful, both monetarily and mentally: it cheapened our users.
We need to completely rethink the value of a visitor in the next era of websites.
We have it in our heads that we need 10,000 visits in order to make $200 a day. Why? This is no longer relevant in the future world of websites where lower quality traffic is ending.
A visitor searching “can my toddler go potty in the fountains of Rome” is 10,000 times less valuable than an American living in Rome who goes to your website every day to connect with other Americans living in Rome.
Less is more when your website transforms into something not created for algorithms and cheap pass-through traffic.
If I, for some reason, decide to love model airplanes, my website of the past might have an article “How To Choose The Right Model Airplane For Beginners (2026 Version),” which, in the past, would have been a pretty valuable article to rank for.
But throw that out. In the future world, my model airplane site is now connected directly to my love for building model airplanes. I’m uploading messy notes, experimenting in public, speaking with every visitor.
My website exists because of my work.
I can’t be a guy who wants to work online so he chooses model airplanes because it’s a content opportunity. I need to be a model airplane enthusiast whose website is connected so naturally and so effortlessly to my work that it feels alive, exciting, and unfinished.
Working on the site should not feel like work at all given the tools we now have at our disposal.
It should feel like I’m working on my model airplanes, and the website simply exists as an extension of that work, which in turn makes the content significantly better.
And as a visitor to that site, your value is nearly infinite to me. You aren’t 1 out of 1,000 visits in a world of $20 RPMs, literally making you worth two cents.
That’s worth reading again. A visitor passing through my site to get a quick answer, then returning to a big tech platform, is worth two cents.
I’m glad we’re leaving that world. In my example above with the model airplane, every visitor is probably worth several dollars because their intent is so high.
This effectively means the website of the future doesn’t need a lot of visitors. It just needs the right visitors, and then revenue will come. New monetization methods will probably emerge as well, and maybe I’ll do a Part 3 of this speculative mini series on that.
Okay, so… we’ve completely reimagined what a website should even be (part 1) and we’ve shattered the old display ad model because it evolved by cheap traffic being in abundance.
But still, how do these higher quality visitors find you? How do we find them?
There are a few ways but you shouldn’t limit yourself to these:
Social media still has value. They just shouldn’t be treated as the ongoing faucet of traffic that translates to money. Rather, they’re opportunities to create awareness that your new and improved website of the future exists. Creativity is key here; not “come visit my site!”
Post a graph of something you did. Or the result of something you tested out. Anything that makes people want to dig in deeper.
Email. I’ve written so much on email-first websites that I won’t rehash it all here. But email can be used in a couple of ways:
- Build a list with paid ads.
- Send emails when something on the site updates.
I’m not oblivious to the fact it’s still going to be difficult to get people to type in your URL every day, so email is the perfect way to ping them.
It’s also very AI summary-friendly. Anything summarizing your inbox is going to tell you “ModelAirplanes.fart sent a note that they put a rocket on Model 32a and sent a hamster into outer space.”
This will continue to work even as Gmail compresses everything of value into tiny bland bits our teeny tiny brains can comprehend.
Link trading? In the prehistoric days of the Internet, we got most of our traffic from other…. websites. It was a wild time. But with websites becoming alive again and worth visiting again, synergies could emerge between different niches.
I wouldn’t bet on this one, but it’s possible.
Business cards. This is the part where you think I’ve gone off the deep end. And maybe that crack rock I licked this morning is catching up with me, but with visitor value so much higher, every human touch point matters. Again, we are not going for pass-through traffic that does not care about our existence and just seeks an answer.
That’s dead. Big Tech ate it.
We are closer to someone with a trade than someone with a website. And trades don’t make two cents per client.
Wrapping this up, maybe I’m actually insane. Maybe I’m painting an impossible picture.
But any change starts with an idea. And this is not us all banding together to stand on the corner and preach that God is coming back to publicly release your conversations with ChatGPT if you don’t start visiting websites again.
It’s looking at the entire digital universe differently. It’s looking at the way we get information rapidly changing into an instantaneous experience that doesn’t require millions of websites spread out all over the web.
And then asking, what does that actually lead to?
It’s short-sighted to not believe this clears a path for new discovery. The Internet doesn’t just end here. We don’t just say, Welp now I can get all my answers from AI, the gig is up, humans are all obsolete.
It just means we are no longer teachers of existing information. We’re creators of new experiences that are real, messy, and… human.
I don’t know how any of this will actually play out. I just know something will, and I find it fascinating.
In the near future, I want to transform my own site into this vision so that this isn’t just a madman’s speculation and hype. And to the very point of literally everything I have been saying, I’ll let you know when I do.
