Nilay Patel sat down for a Decoder interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott to talk about NLWeb, an open source effort to allow an LLM-style indexing of small websites and provide local search. Instead of having large centralized search indexes like Google or Bing, the indexing shifts to sites having their own local indexes that large search platforms hook into via an MCP, an API endpoint for LLMs (basically). Lots to unpack there, but at first glance I like the idea of local ownership of search indexes over the “scrape everything” model that’s killing the Open Web.
I was listening to the episode because it’s relevant to my work, but I also like Nilay Patel’s perspective and think he has a sober 10,000ft view of the tech industry; without fawning over CEOs, new tech, and VC hype. That is rare in “ride the wave” tech media space. One moment in the episode that hit me a little hard was Nilay asking “Why would anyone start a website (in 2025)?”
You know what’s interesting about that? I’ve asked a lot of people over the past several years, “Why would anybody start a website?” And the frame for me is when we started The Verge, the only thing we were ever going to start was a website. We were a bunch of people who wanted to talk about technology, so in 2011 we were going to start a website. We weren’t even going to start a YouTube channel. That came later after people started doing YouTube channels at scale. At the time that we started, it was “you’re going to start a big website.”
Now in 2025, I think, Okay, if I had 11 friends who wanted to start a technology product with me, we would start a TikTok. There’s no chance we would be like, we have to set up a giant website and have all these dependencies. We would start a YouTube channel, and I’ve asked people, “Why would anyone start a website now?” And the answer almost universally is to do e-commerce. It’s to do transactions outside of platform rules or platform taxes. It’s to send people somewhere else to validate that you are a commercial entity of some kind, and then do a transaction, and that is the point of the web.
The other point of the web, as far as I can tell, is that it has become the dominant application platform on desktop. And whether that’s expressed through Electron or whether it’s expressed through the actual web itself in a browser, it’s the application layer… [interview swerves back to AI tools]
As someone who loves websites, blogs in particular, this is a tougher question than I want it to be. Nilay’s conclusion comes down to two types of websites:
- E-commerce
- Application
I don’t think this is a wrong answer, but it does have a whiff of capitalism. These are certainly the most profitable forms of website. Nilay implies the new “way of doing things” is to build your platform in a silo and then branch out into the website game for an economic end. Is the new path to start a YouTube or TikTok and then figure out your web strategy? I certainly know of web dev streamers who jumped into the selling coffee game after minting themselves on YouTube and Twitch. They still maintain their X accounts to capture those eyeballs. I suppose it’s hard to abandon those monetize-able surfaces.
This conversation feels akin to the conversation around the role of a content creator in the age of AI. If these tools can produce content faster, cheaper, and at times better (see: good-fast-cheap triangle)… how do you make a living in the content creation space? Woof. That’s a tough question. And I’d point out the invasion of low-effort content seems to disrupt the whole “content-to-lamborghini” pipeline that Nilay suggested above.
I think my answer to “Why would anybody start a website (in 2025)?” is the same answer for the content creator in the age of AI problem: I don’t know, but you gotta want to. Money sweetens the deal when making content or websites, but we’ve shaken the money tree pretty hard over the last couple decades and it’s looking bare. Increasingly, you’ve got to find other sources of inspiration to make a website – which by the way are still the coolest fucking things ever.
To put a pin on the question about making a website, I guess I’d say… if you have ideas bigger than the 280~500 characters limit? A website. If you make non-portrait videos longer than two-minutes? A website. If you make images bigger than the 1280x720 summary card? A website. You throwing an event and need to communicate details but not everyone has Facebook accounts? A website. You want to eschew the algorithmic popularity game? A website (with RSS). You want to take part in the rewilding your attention movement? A website (with RSS). You want to own your own content? A website. You want to be an anti-capitalist? A website (with RSS). If you want to be a capitalist too, I guess? A website (with a paywall). You want to be anonymous? A website. You want to “share what you know”? A website.
Still reasons to make a website, I think.