There are two rivers running through the internet. The bitstream is the thing you asked for: the video, the article, the song. The bidstream is a torrent of guesses about who you are, broadcast to thousands of buyers before the page finishes loading. One is the product. The other is a description of you sold as a product.

For a long time the bidstream was a rounding error next to the bitstream. A bid request is small. A 4K stream is not. But the bidstream does not send one message per page. It sends one per impression, per exchange, per hop, per resell. A single ad slot can spawn hundreds of near-identical descriptions of the same person, fanned out to every buyer who might pay to reach them. Volume is not a function of content anymore. It is a function of how many times the same attention can be described.

What each flow actually optimizes for

• The bitstream optimizes for fidelity: get the content to the person cleanly.
• The bidstream optimizes for reach: describe the person to as many buyers as physically possible.
• One rewards efficiency. The other rewards duplication.

This is why the plumbing feels heavier every year even when the content does not get bigger. A meaningful slice of the packets crossing an ad-supported page are not the thing you came for. They are metadata about you, in motion. When the description of attention rivals the thing attention is paid to, you have built an economy that spends more to talk about the audience than to serve it.

A market that ships more data about the customer than to the customer is not a media business. It is surveillance with a content subsidy.

Shailin Dhar

The future of the internet’s plumbing gets decided by which river the infrastructure is built to carry. Right now we are pouring concrete for the bidstream and hoping the bitstream fits in what is left. That is backwards. The content is the reason anyone shows up. The description should ride cheap and thin behind it, not clog the pipe it depends on.