Latest news with #MatthewPrince
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Analysts reboot Cloudflare stock price target ahead of earnings
Analysts reboot Cloudflare stock price target ahead of earnings originally appeared on TheStreet. Matthew Prince won't back down. The co-founder and chief executive of cybersecurity Cloudflare () warned that search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on artificial intelligence summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models. 💵💰Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter 💰💵 While search engines and AI chatbots include links to original sources, publishers can only derive advertising revenue if readers click through. "The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content," Prince told Axios last month. Early this month, Cloudflare announced that it had become the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default. Prince noted in a statement that "original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it's essential that creators continue making it." Cloudflare CEO goes to war every single day If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, he said, "we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone – creators, consumers, tomorrow's AI founders, and the future of the web itself." And Prince is confident his company is up to the challenge. More Tech Stocks: Analyst who correctly predicted Rocket Lab stock surge resets forecast Verizon Q2 earnings report surprises with remarks on tax reform Fund manager who forecast Nvidia stock rally reboots outlook "I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites," he declared. "And you're telling me, I can't stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?" Cloudflare recently issued a the 22nd edition of its report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which are malicious attempts to overwhelm a web property with traffic to disrupt its normal operations. June was the busiest month for DDoS attacks during the second quarter, the company said, accounting for nearly 38% of all observed activity. One notable target was an independent Eastern European news outlet protected by Cloudflare, which reported being attacked following its coverage of a local Pride parade during LGBTQ Pride Month. "We've just crossed halfway through 2025, and so far Cloudflare has already blocked 27.8 million DDoS attacks, equivalent to 130% of all the DDoS attacks we blocked in the full calendar year 2024," the company said. Companies are understandably concerned about protecting themselves and global cybersecurity spending is expected to grow by 12.2% this year, according to the IDC Worldwide Security Spending Guide The increasing complexity and frequency of cyberthreats — accelerated by generative AI and AI in general — are driving organizations worldwide to adopt more advanced defensive measures, IDC said. As a result, security spending is expected to see sustained growth throughout the 2023–2028 forecast period, reaching $377 billion in 2028. Analyst says cybersecurity will remain robust Cloudflare is slated to report second-quarter results on July 31 and investment firms have cited corporate cybersecurity spending as a factor for adjusting their price targets for the company's shares. The San Francisco-based group's stock has climbed 86% this year and shares have soared 157% from this time in JMP raised the firm's price target on Cloudflare to $225 from $180 and kept an outperform rating on the shares, according to The Fly. The firm noted positive data points heading into the earnings report, including positive attainment data, and continues to view Cloudflare as the earliest beneficiary of the AI opportunity in its coverage universe. Jefferies raised the firm's price target on Cloudflare to $200 from $150 and kept a hold rating on the shares. The firm said that it believes cybersecurity spend will remain "robust" and continue to hold a "steady percentage" of software budgets in the coming years. Jefferies said that it is keeping a favorable view on security for the long-term saying it has taken on greater importance. Mizuho raised the firm's price target on Cloudflare to $220 from $155 and kept an outperform rating on the shares as part of a second-quarter earnings preview for the software group. The firm said its second quarter checks were good overall, with cybersecurity demand "generally healthy" and AI adoption "very strong. However, the fundamental upside in the quarter could be constrained, as several contacts noted a slightly higher-than expected number of deal push-outs, where a deal's expected close date is pushed to a later time. Mizuho said its favorite stocks to own ahead of the print are cybersecurity company CyberArk () and software giant Microsoft () .Analysts reboot Cloudflare stock price target ahead of earnings first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 28, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 28, 2025, where it first appeared.
Fast Company
4 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
How Cloudflare declared war on AI scrapers
Cloudflare supports more than 20% of total internet traffic. The company recently made headlines with breakthrough technology that blocks AI companies from scraping online content with impunity. Cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince shares how the new tools are poised to dramatically impact AI firms, publishers, and the future of the internet. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You released a new tool that's got a lot of folks buzzing: a blocker for AI crawlers—the bots that scrape content from websites without their consent. You've called this new tool 'the biggest thing' you or the company has ever accomplished? Yeah. I feel incredibly fortunate to have built what today is a $60 billion company on the back of the internet. And we became aware about 18 months ago of a new threat to the internet, to content creators, which was being posed by these AI companies. When we realized that there was something we could do about it, we spent about a year talking to everyone in the content creation space, everyone in the AI space. . . . We're going to change the rules of the road, and say that if you're not paying for content as an AI company, then you don't get that content. Today it's almost 10 times harder to get actual traffic from Google for the same amount of content you created. The minute you show an AI overview, it's less likely that people click on links. And again, that is better for the Google user, but it is worse for the content creator because it means that you can't sell a subscription, you can't sell ads, and you can't even get the ego boost of knowing that people are reading your stuff. Today, OpenAI is 750 times harder to get traffic from than the Google of old. Anthropic is 30,000 times harder to get traffic from than the Google of old. And so, if content creation is struggling today [when it's] 10 times harder, I worry that it won't survive [if it's] 750 times or 30,000 times harder [to read] original content. . . . And if people don't have the incentive to create content, they're not going to create content. So there needs to be some business model behind the future of the web, and it's not going to be around traffic because an AI-driven web doesn't drive traffic. And the irony is that the AI itself needs the content to be able to make those answers. Now who knows where they're going to get their answers from. That's the key: 80% of the major AI companies use Cloudflare in their infrastructure. What they have all said, with a few exceptions, is 'We agree, content creators need to get paid for content, but it has to be a level playing field.' What nobody wants to do is pay for content where all of their competitors get it for free. So, creating that level playing field is incredibly important. Just Anthropic will scrape a site 60,000 times for every one visitor that's there. Someone has to pay for that traffic. Just from a pure fairness perspective, they should be compensating creators that they're pulling that content from. We started as a cybersecurity company. We go to war every day with Russian hackers, Iranian hackers, North Korean hackers, Chinese hackers who are trying to get in and thwart our systems. So when we first started talking to publishers about this, it was almost this sort of nihilistic, 'Oh my gosh, what are we possibly going to do? There's no way we can stop it. These guys are so smart, they're a bunch of nerds in Palo Alto. . . . We can't ever possibly block them.' And I remember thinking, We block the North Koreans every day. AI companies are a piece of cake. Before you release the first round of this tool, did you give the AI companies a heads-up? I think there are some bad actors out there, and I think it'll surprise some people who the bad actors are. We're monitoring them, and very soon we will publish and we will name and shame who is actually a bad actor in this space. And we will take from what has been basically posting a speed limit sign that says 'Don't drive more than 55 miles an hour' . . . and we'll make it into something that is actually much more strict. We're saying, 'Listen, we're taking away your car, you're not allowed to drive on the road anymore.' I understand you're exploring sort of a pay-per-crawl model with some of the content publishers, which to me sounds a little bit like a toll on the highway—that you have to pay a toll if you want to come through. If you are generating a huge amount of cost by crawling somebody, but you're not giving them any benefit, then step one is block them. Then once you've created scarcity, then there can be a market, right? There has to be some compensation for taking content, and it's not going to be traffic anymore, it's going to be something else. Now the question is, 'Okay, how do you pay?' And I think a lot of times, big AI companies and big publishers are just going to negotiate deals themselves. So if you're Condé Nast, you go out and do an OpenAI deal, or a Google deal, or something else, and you negotiate it yourself. We don't have any role in that. I think for the smaller AI companies, or for the long tail of publishers, Cloudflare can hopefully sit in between and help negotiate what is the best deal. And we don't know exactly what that will look like yet. It could be a micropayment every time a page is accessed. It could be something that's closer to a Spotify model where there's a pool of funds and that gets distributed out to all of the different content providers. . . . That will develop, but step one in any market has to be scarcity. If you don't have scarcity, you don't have a market. I'm actually optimistic [that] all of us are going to have subscriptions to a certain number of AI agents that are out there. And how AI companies will differentiate themselves is access to unique content that they have and they have alone. So, imagine Taylor Swift is about to release a new album, and she does an interview with some journalists, and they are willing to give that interview to one AI company exclusively for a week. How much is that worth? Probably quite a bit, right? A lot of people are going to sign up. And so, I'm actually optimistic that we might be at the precipice of a golden age of content creation. If we do this right, and we get the incentives right, it might be that instead of us all worshiping the deity that Google taught us to worship, which is traffic, which has always been a really bad proxy for value, if instead we find a way to compensate creators based on when they actually create something which is worthwhile and advances human knowledge, we can actually do some real good in the world, at the same time that we help the content creators get paid more.
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Jim Cramer on Cloudflare: 'The Stock Should Be Bought Even Up Here'
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer weighed in on. A caller inquired about the company, and Cramer replied: 'Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. I thought Matthew Prince was brilliant. I think NET's great. I've been behind this for, since probably for about 120 points. I think Matthew's about as good as it gets, and the stock should be bought even up here.' Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) provides cloud-based security, performance, and networking services designed to protect and optimize websites, applications, and IT infrastructure. Its solutions include Zero Trust security, DDoS protection, content delivery, and developer tools to support businesses. Cramer also discussed the company during a March episode of Squawk on the Street, as he commented: 'You wanna talk Cloudflare? A Sell to a Buy at Bank of America? It goes from price target 60 to 160? I have Mathew Prince on regularly, okay. Mathew Prince has done more cybersecurity and internet and also he does the. . he protects voting. . .but he has a very solid internet secure plan. And why anyone would say sell that company? It is extraordinarily wrong. But I like the fact that at least he owned up.' While we acknowledge the potential of NET as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 30 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 11 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Right Now. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Three Skills You Need To Master In The Age Of AI, According To Tech Execs
AI agent adoption is projected to grow by 327% by 2027, a new report from Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) finds. This is expected to increase a company's productivity by 30%, but will drastically impact the way those companies are organized and run. With the implementation of these AI agents, an estimated 61% of a company's workforce will remain in their current roles. However, their day-to-day responsibilities will almost certainly be impacted, human resource executives said. Around 75% of the HR executives surveyed said that they expect soft skills to become much more important and that collaboration and adaptability skills will become increasingly valued in the new AI economy. Don't Miss: Deloitte's fastest-growing software company partners with Amazon, Walmart & Target – Many are rushing to grab $100k+ in investable assets? – no cost, no obligation. Tech executives who spoke to Business Insider about the findings agreed, highlighting three skills in particular. First, you'll need to become a generalist. "Deep expertise will be less valued" in this new AI-driven world, Cognizant Technology Solutions (NASDAQ:CTSH) CEO Ravi Kumar told the outlet. Instead, he suggests learning how to merge that expertise with technological capabilities to make yourself a more appealing candidate. Cloudflare Inc. (NYSE:NET) CEO Matthew Prince agreed, saying, "We're trying to find people who have a broad set of skills and can be general.' Second, tech executives say creativity will be the key to making yourself stand out from the crowd. Trending: Named a TIME Best Invention and Backed by 5,000+ Users, Kara's Air-to-Water Pod Cuts Plastic and Costs — Dropbox (NASDAQ:DBX) Vice President of Product and Growth Morgan Brown told Business Insider that with AI taking on many of the more mundane, time-consuming tasks for many roles, employees will have more time for "expansive thinking" about new ideas. The third skill you'll need to master in the age of AI is proficiency with AI tools, execs say. Google Cloud Product Executive Yasmeen Ahmad told the outlet that successful employees will be able to "interact with these new-age tools and be able to prompt to engineer and ask the right questions and interact in this flow that hasn't been there before." Will Grannis, Google Cloud's chief technology officer, took things a step further, telling Business Insider a strong candidate will not only know how to craft their queries effectively but will go "beyond the formal curriculum" to learn how to do things like use AI to code. Read Next: This AI-Powered Trading Platform Has 5,000+ Users, 27 Pending Patents, and a $43.97M Valuation — Warren Buffett once said, "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die." Image: Shutterstock UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article The Three Skills You Need To Master In The Age Of AI, According To Tech Execs originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Times
15-07-2025
- Business
- Business Times
AI is killing the Web. Can anything save it?
AROUND the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the chief executives of large media companies. They told Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the Web, that their businesses faced a grave new online threat. 'I said, 'What, is it the North Koreans?',' he recalls. 'And they said, 'No. It's AI'.' Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the Web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that 'content' publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic. As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the Internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open Web may evolve into something very different. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have embraced a new way to seek information online. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, says that around 800 million people use the chatbot. It is the most popular download on the iPhone App Store. Apple said that conventional searches in its Safari Web browser had fallen for the first time in April, as people posed their questions to AI instead. OpenAI is soon expected to launch a browser of its own. Its rise is so dramatic that a Hollywood adaptation is in the works. As OpenAI and other upstarts have soared, Google, which has about 90 per cent of the conventional search market in America, has added AI features to its own search engine in a bid to keep up. Last year, it began preceding some search results with AI-generated 'overviews', which have since become ubiquitous. In May, it launched 'AI mode', a chatbot-like version of its search engine. The company promises that, with AI, users can 'let Google do the googling for you'. Yet as Google does the googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. Similarweb, which measures traffic to more than 100 million Web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic (by humans) fell by about 15 per cent in the year to June. Although some categories, such as hobbyists' sites, are doing fine, others have been hit hard. Many of the most affected are just the kind that might have commonly answered search queries. Science and education sites have lost 10 per cent of their visitors. Reference sites have lost 15 per cent. Health sites have lost 31 per cent. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up For companies that sell advertising or subscriptions, lost visitors means lost revenue. 'We had a very positive relationship with Google for a long time... They broke the deal,' says Neil Vogel, head of Dotdash Meredith, which owns titles such as People and Food & Wine. Three years ago, its sites got more than 60 per cent of their traffic from Google. Now the figure is in the mid-30s. 'They are stealing our content to compete with us,' adds Vogel. Google has insisted that its use of others' content is fair. But since it launched its AI overviews, the share of news-related searches resulting in no onward clicks has risen from 56 per cent to 69 per cent, estimates Similarweb. In other words, seven in 10 people get their answer without visiting the page that supplied it. 'The nature of the Internet has completely changed,' says Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, best known as an online forum for coders. 'AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites,' he notes. With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards. Wikipedia, also powered by enthusiasts, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution 'block pathways for people to access…and contribute to' the site. To keep the traffic and the money coming, many big content producers have negotiated licensing deals with AI companies, backed up by legal threats: what Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, has dubbed 'wooing and suing'. His company, which owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other titles, has struck a deal with OpenAI. Two of its subsidiaries are suing Perplexity, another AI answer engine. The New York Times has done a deal with Amazon while suing OpenAI. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist's parent company has not taken a public position on whether it will license our work.) Yet this approach has limits. For one thing, judges so far seem minded to side with AI companies: last month two separate copyright cases in California went in favour of their defendants, Meta and Anthropic, both of which argued that training their models on others' content amounted to fair use. US President Donald Trump seems to accept Silicon Valley's argument that it must be allowed to get on with developing the technology of the future before China can. He has appointed tech boosters as advisers on AI, and sacked the head of the US Copyright Office soon after she argued that training AI on copyrighted material was not always legal. AI companies are more willing to pay for continuing access to information than training data. But the deals done so far are hardly stellar. Reddit, an online forum, has licensed its user-generated content to Google for a reported US$60 million a year. Yet its market value fell by more than half – over US$20 billion – after it reported slower user-growth than expected in February, owing to wobbles in search traffic. (Growth has since picked up and Reddit's share price has recovered some lost ground.) The bigger problem, however, is that most of the Internet's hundreds of millions of domains are too small to either woo or sue the tech giants. Their content may be collectively essential to AI firms, but each site is individually dispensable. Even if they could join forces to bargain collectively, antitrust law would forbid it. They could block AI crawlers, and some do. But that means no search visibility at all. Software providers may be able to help. All of Cloudflare's new customers will now be asked if they want to allow AI companies' bots to scrape their site, and for what purpose. Cloudflare's scale gives it a better chance than most of enabling something like a collective response by content sites that want to force AI firms to cough up. It is testing a pay-as-you-crawl system that would let sites charge bots an entry fee. 'We have to set the rules of the road,' says Prince, who adds that his preferred outcome is 'a world where humans get content for free, and bots pay a tonne for it'. An alternative is offered by TollBit, which bills itself as a paywall for bots. It allows content sites to charge AI crawlers varying rates: for instance, a magazine could charge more for new stories than old ones. In the first quarter of this year TollBit processed 15 million micro-transactions of this sort, for 2,000 content producers including the Associated Press and Newsweek. Toshit Panigrahi, its CEO, points out that whereas traditional search engines incentivise samey content – 'What time does the Super Bowl start?', for example – charging for access incentivises uniqueness. One of TollBit's highest per-crawl rates is charged by a local newspaper. Another model is being put forward by ProRata, a startup led by Bill Gross, a pioneer in the 1990s of the pay-as-you-click online ads that have powered much of the Web ever since. He proposes that money from ads placed alongside AI-generated answers should be redistributed to sites in proportion to how much their content contributed to the answer. ProRata has its own answer engine, which shares ad revenue with its 500-plus partners, which include the Financial Times and The Atlantic. It is currently more of an exemplar than a serious threat to Google. Gross says his main aim is to 'show a fair business model that other people eventually copy'. Meanwhile, content producers are rethinking their business models. 'The future of the Internet is not all about traffic,' says Chandrasekar, who has built up Stack Overflow's private, enterprise-oriented subscription product, Stack Internal. News publishers are planning for 'Google zero', deploying newsletters and apps to reach customers who no longer come to them via search, and moving their content behind paywalls or to live events. Audio and video are proving legally and technically harder for AI engines to summarise than text. The site to which answer engines refer search traffic most often, by far, is YouTube, according to Similarweb. Not everyone thinks the Web is in decline – on the contrary, it is in 'an incredibly expansionary moment', argues Robby Stein of Google. As AI makes it easier to create content, the number of sites is growing: Google's bots report that the Web has expanded by 45 per cent in the past two years. AI search lets people ask questions in new ways – for instance, taking a photo of their bookshelf and asking for recommendations on what to read next – which could increase traffic. With AI queries, more sites than ever are being 'read', even if not with human eyes. An answer engine may scan hundreds of pages to deliver an answer, drawing on a more diverse range of sources than human readers would. As for the idea that Google is disseminating less human traffic than before, Stein says the company has not noticed a dramatic decline in the number of outbound clicks, though it declines to make the number public. There are other reasons besides AI why people may be visiting sites less. Maybe they are scrolling social media. Maybe they are listening to podcasts. The death of the Web has been predicted before – at the hands of social networks, then smartphone apps –and not come to pass. But AI may pose the biggest threat to it yet. If the Web is to continue in something close to its current form, sites will have to find new ways to get paid for content. 'There's no question that people prefer AI search,' says Gross. 'And to make the Internet survive, to make democracy survive, to make content creators survive, AI search has to share revenue with creators.' ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
