The Business of Dis-Pleasure

We take a wincing look at the pain inflicted to boost subscription service revenues and ask will Platforms lose the whip hand to Agent(ic) Provocateurs?

There is no monument to the estimated seventeen thousand wannabe video platforms that  

sank without trace in the early days of the web. YouTube itself might well have been counted amongst them if its direct competitors such as Vimeo, Google Video and the unfortunately named ‘Daily Motion’ had got off the pot quicker.  

Shortly after Google acquired the hugely successful (but terminally unprofitable) YouTube it integrated the platform with the ‘contextual search engine’ (later rebranded Google AdSense) which it had purchased from Applied Semantics in 2003. Now creators could monetise their content with advertising revenue (reportedly on a 55/45 split with YouTube) but the essential problem remained: How do you arm-twist viewers into paying for the service without losing the eyeballs that the advertisers* demand?

Well one way of achieving this is to constantly repeat the same ad over and over and over…If I ever meet that Tai Chi guy in the street I’m going to pin him to the nearest tree and sing “A million housewives every day pick up a can of beans and say…” one million and one times.

Or you could show unskippable (and unbearable) 30 second ads and maybe update your audiences on the latest surgical procedures for veterinary surgeons.

Amazon Prime Video appear to have gone one step further.  Not content with repeating the same incredibly bad ads ad infinitum, they now seem to be actively slating low quality product from which to harvest ads tailor-made to send us screaming into ad-free subscription.

It was the Canadian blogger Cory Doctorow who coined the term enshittification:

'Here is how platforms die: first they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value with the nature of a ‘two-side market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to each other, raking off an ever larger share of the value that passes between them.**

But that was back in the Early Middle Ages, January 2023.  The struggle for consumer sign-up has intensified exponentially since then:

‘The impact of Agentic AI may be especially profound for the economics of advertising supported digital platforms. Agentic mediation breaks the link between human eyeball attention and content on websites and other digital platforms. Instead of human users consuming content and browsing products on marketplaces, agents do that on behalf of users. Agents may also negotiate on behalf of users. This is at odds with traditional online business models predicated on human user (aka “eyeball”) attention to content. Traditional network effects often relied on direct user engagement and attention - if humans no longer visit sites directly, ‘traditional’ human-user network effects may weaken.

Today, advertisers fund much of the web, but they pay for human exposure and are incentivised to invest by a platform’s ability to attract human attention.  When agents replace or augment humans as ‘primary consumers’, the role of platform intermediaries and related digital economics changes.  First, conventional metrics for measuring engagement and reach must be reimagined as the nature and locus of user interaction change. When bots controlling bots are the source of website impressions and click counts, today’s key currency of our digital economy is instantly devalued.  Second, the locus of monetisation channels may change. Companies may redirect their advertising budgets from websites and other consumer-facing platforms directly to AI development, helping to establish new avenues for (covert or shadow principal) influence… ***

And how will the multi-billion-dollar consumer data industry adapt to the new environment? Will ‘traditional’ segmentation and persona construction pivot towards surfacing insights into AI Agentic purchasing behaviours and biases? 

If it hasn’t already of course?

Alongside creating rewards for ‘incentivising’ that behaviour towards a specific product or service without the consumer knowing:

‘Because the effects will be highly market-context dependent and outcomes are infeasible to forecast reliably, effective AI governance will rely on agile adaptive frameworks and guardrails that can only be adequately designed and effectively enforced if we have sufficient understanding about agentic bargaining. A key requisite will be a measurement ecosystem capable of evaluating these transactions and bargaining outcomes.’ ****

Which is not as far-fetched as it may seem at first glance.  Because in the longer term, it will all come down to trust, or ‘ the willingness to be vulnerable towards the actions of trustees without explicitly controlling or supervising trust,’ as the authors of a canonical work on the subject suggest.*****

They break trust down into three components, as defined as:

Ability:

‘Ability is that group of skills, competences and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within some specific domain…’

Benevolence:

‘Benevolence is the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor

aside from any egocentric profit motive.’

Integrity:  

‘The relationship between integrity and trust involves the trustor’s perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable.’

…and while you consider the implications of this third point, I will doubtless be listening to a thirty second YouTube ad telling me how I can learn to play the piano like Franz Liszt, the fiddle like Nicolo Paganini, and bicycle kick like Wayne Rooney, and all in less than a week, before Rag’n’Bone Man is finally permitted to deliver the line:  

“But I’m only human, after all.” 

DT 12 February 2026

*In 2024 YouTube generated circa $36.15 billion in advertising revenue (up from 31.5 billion in 2023) while it combined subscription services, including YouTube Premium, YouTube Music and YouTube TV generated approximately $14.5 billion, with YouTube Premium surpassing 100 million subscribers

 **Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification, 21 January 2023

 *** & ****Principal-Agent Dynamics and Digital (Platform) Economics in the Age of Agentic AI, Volker Stocker and William Lehr, Network Law Review, Fall 2025.

 ******An Integrative model of Organisational Trust Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis, F. David Schoorman The Academy of Management Review, July 1995